LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

Vp$ — <3m*w — 

Shelf, M-335S^ 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



SERMONS OF RELIGION- and 



LIFE: BY HENRY DOTY^ MAX- 
SON: With Biographical Sketch 
by Henry Martyn Simmons: The 
Sermons Edited by James Vila 
Blake: Published by the Unitarian 
Society of Menomonie, Wisconsin, in 
Memory of their beloved Minister, and to 
give to others a portion of the Ministry 
that has helped them: 





CHARLES H. KERR AND COMPANY, 
1893. 





Copyright, 1893, 
By Ada Wells Maxson. 



PREFACE. 



It was Mr. Maxson's habit to write his sermons in one of 
the phonographic systems of stenography, of which he seems 
to have been a master. When, after his sudden death in 
the very beginning and promise of a great usefulness, his 
people desired to put forth in print some of the sermons 
which had instructed and charmed them, it was necessary 
that a considerable number of them should be translated 
from the stenographic characters by a stenographer versed 
in the same system. Of the sermons so translated, thirteen 
included in this volume were chosen by the parishoners and 
handed over to the editor. Two discourses have had the 
advantage of revision by the author, namely, the discussion 
of Agnosticism and the sermon of Immortality, both of which 
came to the editor in print, having been published previously 
under Mr. Maxson's own care. These two of course have 
gone into the volume as the author left them. As the other 
thirteen came to the editor through a short-hand and a trans- 
lation thereof, and the more as Mr. Maxson evidently was 
in the habit sometimes of filling out his notes with extem- 
porary speech, it was inevitable that the sermons should 
need detailed editing. It ought to be said, therefore, that 
the editor has been very scrupulous to preserve untouched 
whenever possible, and not to mar anywhere, the traits of 
the author's individual character and manner. Mr. Max- 
son's qualities of style have been respected faithfully, and 



4 



PREFACE 



no opinion or critical view has been passed on by the editor 
or altered in the least. 

The first sermon in this volume, "Religious Possibilities 
of Agnosticism," and the last, " How Much does he Get?" 
are respectively the first and the last discourses given by 
the lamented minister in his Menomonie pulpit. 

The sermons will speak for themselves. But perhaps it 
is right, as certainly it is pleasant to me, that I should ex- 
press my admiration for them. They are marked by a moral- 
ity of a striking quality; I mean not only in respect of 
earnestness and sincerity, which belong to morality essen- 
tially, but also in respect of a peculiar penetrating power. 
They seize hold of the reader and cut through to his con- 
science. This quality of the sermons is the result of the 
union of a pure truthfulness and unselfishness with mental 
power and an observation of men and things equally kindly 
and keen. 



May, 1893. 



J. V. B. 



CONTENTS. 



Biographical Sketch. .... 9 

Religious Possibilities of Agnosticism . . , 45 

Am I my Brother's Keeper ... 77 

Sympathy . . . . . .95 

Which is Catching, Health or Disease? . . 111 

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A study in Dualsim . .130 

Faith - . . . . . . 150 

Shall we Preach the Whole Truth to the People? . 168 

Who are the Atheists? .... 187 

Do Unitarians Believe the Bible? . . . 206 

What do Unitarians Believe? . . . 226 

Jesus . . . . ' . . 248 

The True Individualism .... 260 

Immortality ...... 285 

Losing One's Soul ..... 301 

How Much does he Get? . . . 317 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



BY H. M. SIMMONS. 

Henry Doty Maxson's name and ancestors 
appear with the first New England settlers. 
Among the forty-one who signed the compact 
in the Mayflower was Edward Doty. He was 
a young servant, but his worth was seen, and 
he was one of the few selected to accompany 
Governor Carver and Captain Standish in the 
shallop, and search the shores to find a place 
for settling. After five days' perils, a fight 
with Indians and freezing waves which made 
their clothes ''many times like coats of iron, " 
the little party landed at Plymouth, Dec. 21; 
and Edward Doty thus became one of the ten 
settlers who made that day and place historic. 
Doubtless he was prominent in other early 
dangers. For he was a bold and fiery spirit 
and only six months later, defying Puritan pen- 
9 



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altiesand principles, he faced death in a duel. 
The old chronicle says it was "the first duel 
fought in New England, upon a challenge 
at single combat with sword and dagger," 
and that both parties were wounded. What- 
ever may be thought of this outburst of chiv- 
alry, the reader of these sermons will see 
significance in its fearlessness, and be very 
glad it was not fatal. Edward Doty remained 
to marry Faith Clarke and multiply his 
courage through eight children and their many 
descendants. The Dotys gave many soldiers, 
a captain, a colonel, to our early wars, and a 
brave governor to Wisconsin. They married 
well too ; and among wives of Revolutionary 
soldiers, we read of Susannah Doty who knit 
to her 99th year, and took the premium for 
best "hose-work" in her 97th. Among Edward 
Doty's female descendants, Desire married a 
son of Miles Stanbish, others united with the 
Otis and Warren familes, and one of the fifth 
generation married Benjamin Enos, legislator, 
canal commissioner and state treasurer of New 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 11 

York. From this last marriage was born Sena 
Ann Enos, who became wife of Charles H. 
Maxson and mother of Henry Doty. 

The father's family was almost as early in 
New England. Richard Maxson is said to 
have been a member of the Plymouth church in 
1634, and seems to have been one of those who 
soon after went to Rhode Island for more re- 
ligious freedom, — being mentioned two or three 
times in the records of the old town of Ports- 
mouth which preceded Newport. His religion 
was not yet perfect, and those records for 1638 
tell how "Richard Maxson, blacksmith, upon 
complaints made against him, was accordingly 
detected for his oppression in the way of trade, 
who, being convinced thereof, promised amend- 
ment and satisfaction." Amendment followed, 
and his family soon reached honor. His son, 
John Maxson, sat in the General Assembly as 
deputy from Westerly several times in the 
seventeenth century, and other descendants 
held the same office in the eighteenth. The 
Maxsons were very conscientious in their relig- 



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ion, and to keep the Sabbath as the Bible 
commands many of them became Seventh 
Day Baptists. One was minister of this de- 
nomination at Westerly as early as 1738, and the 
Maxson family produced several preachers. 
One of its sons took a wife from the Bliss 
family which was also marked by several min- 
isters; and from this marriage was born 
Charles, father of Henry Doty Maxson. 

The latter was born Sept. 6, 1852, in Mad- 
ison Co., N. Y., on a farm four miles north 
from De Ruyter. He was a genuine boy; 
healthy, happy, fond of sport, good in a race 
or wrestle, and early showing a keen sense of 
humor and quick wit. He early showed also 
the moral qualities which so marked his later 
life; was very truthful, so fair as to be the usual 
umpire in the disputes of his playmates, and 
bad a careful regard for others' feelings. This 
regard extended even to animals, and while 
quite young, this descendant of the first New 
England duelist gave up gun and fishing-rod 
rather than cause suffering. But this meant no 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



13 



effeminacy, and in resisting what he thought 
wrong or dishonorable he was as fearless as 
that old fighter. One of his early schoolmates 
writes: "He would never engage in any of 
our mischievous pranks, he would chide us, 
but would have died before reporting any 
scholar to the teachers. " " 

He faithfully shared the farm work with his 
father and brother Charles, but his field was 
evidently elsewhere. From infancy he was in- 
tellectual, quick to learn, fond of books and 
study, thoughtful beyond his years. His re- 
ligious ancestry and home gave direction to 
his thoughts. The little boy held meetings 
with his brother and preached; and in his 
twelfth year, he joined the village church, and 
became an active member, with much local 
renown for his knowledge of the Bible. Plainly 
he would be another of those Seventh Day 
Baptist preachers. So in preparation, he went 
to their two leading denominational schools, 
first to De Ruyter institute, then to Alfred Uni- 
versity in 1871. 



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But at the latter, this plan perished. With 
little aid except from increasing knowledge, 
his own vigorous thought rapidly outgrew the 
doctrines of his denomination and of Christian 
theology, and at the end of the first year he 
came home a rationalist. This brought the 
chief trial and trouble of his life. It destroyed 
his cherished hopes of preaching. It took away 
one of his parents' chief motives in his educa- 
tion. Worst of all, it pained them, and often 
that summer he suffered as much as they, in 
seeing his father' s sadness and the tears which 
his mother could not always hide. But he was 
too conscientious to let even love to parents 
warp his loyalty to principle. As he said 
afterward in a college oration, evidently utter- 
ing this sad summer's experience, "the Truth 
ever speaks to the human soul" in those words, 
"he that loveth father or mother more than 
me is not worthy of me." He would not wait 
as urged, insisted upon withdrawing his name 
from the church roll at once, ceased to call 
himself a Christian, and gave up the worldly 
gains which that name brings. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



15 



But he was still eager for education, and 
wished to enter Amherst College at once and 
in an advanced class. His health however had 
suffered from overwork and anxiety, and his 
parents urged him to rest a year and then take 
the full course, for which they would willingly 
pay. This he did, spending the year mostly 
at home, some of it behind a wheelbarrow in 
a gang of public workmen, though sometimes 
leaving the load to aid the engineer in mathe- 
matical calculations. He then went to Am- 
herst, entering in 1873, graduating in 1877. 

This college life was brilliantly successful. 
In scholarship, he stood among the first seven 
in the entrance examinations; and afterward 
made such progress that, though checked by 
serious illness in the latter part of his course, 
he graduated as leader and valedictorian of a 
class of seventy -five. His literary ability was 
no less marked, and he was made one of the 
college editors, and class orator at gradua- 
tion. Of his general excellence in college, his 
room-mate for three years and most intimate 



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acquaintance, Rev. Frank S. Adams, the well- 
known Congregational minister of Reading, 
Mass., has recently written as follows: 

"In choosing Mr. Maxson for our class ora- 
tor, we simply carried out our desire to pre- 
sent the best representative of all-round 
scholarship among us. In the essentials of 
a scholar, particularly as Emerson describes 
them, and above all in that self-trust which 
makes one able and willing to stand by his 
own instincts of truth and right against the 
world courageously and patiently, he was 
easily our first man. He was greatly beloved 
by a circle of intimate friends and respected 
by all. He impressed us by his serenity, the 
thoroughness with which he did his work, the 
boldness of his views, his utter disregard of 
tradition, his ability as a writer and debater, 
his knowledge of public questions and affairs, 
his good humor and frequent flashes of wit, 
and his genial sympathy with others. He 
moved among us as an inspiring example of 
devotion to the truth as he saw it, of fidelity to 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



17 



convictions, of loyalty to friends, of the highest 
ideals of scholarship." 

That "fidelity to convictions" however un- 
fashionable, was often shown in his college 
life. He defended female suffrage so fearlessly 
that it furnished the point for his picture in 
the class "Augury." Among the sins which 
he rebuked as editor was that of throwing 
stones at animals, even without hitting them, — 
"you scare the cats and harm yourselves. " But 
his frank fidelity was shown most in religious 
matters. Though most of his class were pro- 
fessing Christians, and fifty-six church-mem- 
bers, he did not hide his heresies. Rather he 
made it his duty to utter them, and gathered a 
"Radical Club," which met Sunday evenings 
to discuss ethical and religious questions un- 
der his leadership. But though radical, he was 
maturely so, and had more censure for irever- 
ence and shallowness than for superstition. 
One of his college essays was on "The Dog- 
matism of Anti-dogma." He was evidently 
feeling Emerson's influence. That class ora- 



IS 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



tion on "The Attitude of the Scholar in Relig- 
ious Inquiry," urges self-reliance, but pleads 
for reverent and broad thought. Alluding to 
the scientist's sympathetic study of a fossil, 
he adds, "Is not a creed more sacred than a 
coral?" and he quotes with commendation 
the sentence that to be free in thought is not 
to be "on the warpath hunting for the scalps 
of superstition," but "to have one's truth 
so central that you are a citizen of many 
faiths and able to tell the good as well as the 
evil in them." Rev. F. S. Adams says again 
that though Mr. Maxson held an "apparently 
unyielding attitude toward anything that looked 
toward the evangelical position," still "so 
clear were his views upon ethical and religious 
questions, so healthful his personal influence, 
and so marked his gifts of oratory, that my 
regret because he deemed himself unable to 
enter the ministry found expression once or 
twice in the suggestion, 'But you might be a 
Unitarian minister.' His reply however indi- 
cated that he had no idea of ever finding him- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



19 



self at home in any pulpit." So he left college 
to become a teacher. 

Soon after, Sept. 5, 1877, he married Miss 
Ada A. Wells, of Cazenovia, who brought a 
new help and happiness to his life. In Jan- 
uary, 1878, they came to Milton College, Wis., 
where he taught languages for a year and a 
half. It was a Seventh Day Baptist institu- 
tion, but Mr. Maxson did not conceal his re- 
ligious opinions, and one writes that he kept 
prominent among his pictures a portrait of 
Thomas Paine. In the summer of 1879, they 
moved to Milwaukee, where he taught various 
branches for four years in the Markham Acad- 
emy. Various other work he did there, and 
in June, 1880, reports to his college class: 
"I also run an educational department in the 
'Sunday Sentinel.' Still keep my hobbies 
well groomed, metric system, spelling reform, 
and woman suffrage." In the summer of 1881, 
their home was gladdened by the birth of a 
daughter, Sena, who however remained but 
little over a year. June, 1885, a second daugh- 



20 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



ter, Julia, was born to them, and made the 
home complete again. Meanwhile, in the sum- 
mer of 1883, they had moved to Whitewater, 
Wis. Here Mr. Maxson served as institute 
conductor and general teacher for the State 
Normal School for almost five years. 

In this more than ten years' work as teacher, 
he had an unusual success and influence, and 
won the lasting esteem of many hundreds of 
pupils, parents and teachers. He was fitted 
for it by his natural fondness for the young, 
and genial ways with them. He was peculiarly 
fitted by his intellectual qualities. He was 
full and accurate in his learning, clear and 
orderly in its presentation, skilful in arousing 
and directing inquiry, and hence excelled in 
conducting a class. But here as everywhere 
what told most was his moral quality. His 
love of truth and right made all trust him. 
He also trusted his pupils, and by his gentle 
methods and care to discourage no one by any 
sarcasm or display of learning, made them 
trust themselves. Says Mr. C. E. Herring, 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



21 



who was one of them for four years at White 
water: "I never heard him reprimand a stu- 
dent to secure order, better attention or more 
careful preparation. Yet he obtained all these 
in a marvelous degree. His teaching was an 
inspiration of confidence in one's self. He 
never humiliated a pupil or subjected him to 
ridicule. No heart-burnings or tears left his 
class-room, but hope and added power. He 
was modest everywhere and in everything. 
He was always ready with 'I do not know' ; but 
when the answer was given, his pupils learned 
that the unspoken 'I do know/ could be 
depended upon." This quality is also illustrat- 
ed by a teacher who tells how her boy said to 
her when she began: "Now, mamma, if you 
want the students to like you, you must try 
to be like Professor Maxson; when any one 
asks you anything you don't know, just say 
you don't know, and when you make a mis- 
take, just own up to it." 

Tributes to the excellence and good influence 
of his school work abound. Mrs. Ada Ray 



22 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



Cooke, one of the faculty in the Whitewater 
Normal School, writes that Mr. Maxson, "as a 
teacher, was clear, exact, earnest and faithful, 
inspired each with a desire to do his best, and 
enjoyed the perfect confidence of every teacher 
and student." Prof. J. W. Stearns, now of 
the State University, but then president of the 
Normal School, says of Mr. Maxson's work 
there: "It brought him into connection with 
a large body of young people, upon whom his 
influence was strong and inspiring. His genial 
manners and his kindly interest in them and 
their pursuits, made warm personal friends of 
his pupils. He stood before them a refined 
gentleman of quick sympathies, thorough schol- 
arship and lofty aims, and they were broad- 
ened and uplifted by the intercourse with 
him. " 

But he was gradually returning to the work 
of his first choice. During most of his life at 
Whitewater, he gave much time to a very suc- 
cessful Bible class which he led in the Uni- 
versalist church. He still kept all his early 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



2H 



interest in religious questions. He liked them 
for their intellectual side, and even for the 
disputes they caused; and to a woman who 
said she never cared for theological discus- 
sions, he replied that she had missed a great 
deal of amusement. And he more and more 
saw the possibility of reconciling religion 
with the deepest thought, and of enlarging it 
to include all good work. Soon after coming 
to Wisconsin, he called on Rev. J. L. Jones, 
then at Janesville, to learn about the Unitarian 
work in the West. Afterward he became well 
acquainted with Rev. J. H. Crooker, of Mad- 
ison, and was finally induced to read a paper 
at the Wisconsin Unitarian Conference, at 
Baraboo, June, 1887. The paper was on "The 
Religious Possibilities of Agnosticism," and 
proved them. In it he confessed his agnos- 
ticism, ranked Ethics first, and boldly said : 
"Rather let the heavens be impenetrable brass 
and no whisper of the Eternal ever come to 
our eager souls, than that we fail to embody in 
our lives the highest ideals of duty to our fel- 



'-34 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



low-men." But he found room enough for Re- 
ligion too, and said: "Jehovah is indeed gone; 
but that in Jehovah which made worship pos- 
sible, the mysterious depths of the Divine 
nature, yet abides. 'The Infinite and Eternal 
Energy by which all things are created and 
sustained', no longer speaks to my ear in ar- 
ticulate language from Sinai; but I seem to 
feel its influence pressing from every direction 
upon my soul. In the presence of that Power 
which passes the possibilities of delineation, 
1 would bow in reverent awe, in not unloving 
trust. " 

The praise given to this paper at the Con- 
ference, and when soon after printed in the 
"Unitarian Review," showed that Mr. Maxson 
would be warmly welcomed to the pulpit of 
that denomination. Without any further con- 
fession of faith he was recommended by Mr. 
Crooker and Mr. Forbush for the movement 
which they had recently started at Menomonie, 
Wis. He went there one October Sunday of 
that year and gave this paper, and preached 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



25 



again a few weeks later. The result was that 
he received and accepted an enthusiastic call, 
and began his ministry there the next April, 
1888. On the ninth of that month was organ- 
ized, under his direction, the "Unitarian So- 
ciety of Menomonie, " some thirty persons 
signing its "bond of union." This bond, 
though first written for the organization of the 
society at Madison some years before, quite 
expressed Mr. Maxson's ideas of the proper 
breadth and aim of a church. It declared that 
the society "shall make integrity of life its 
first aim, and leave thought free," and shall 
"accept to its membership all of whatsoever 
theological opinion, who wish to unite with 
us in the promotion of truth, righteousness, 
reverence and charity among men." Simple 
signature to this was all the ceremony, he asked 
of persons uniting with the church. 

The same simplicity marked all the work in 
his church. He received no ordination or in- 
stallation, beyond the necessary business one 
by the officers of his society. He disliked all 



26 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



formalities in religion, and believed it should 
be entirely natural. He saw no propriety in 
the custom of "asking a blessing" at the mo- 
ment when people are apt to be in a most un- 
spiritual mood, and seems to have been in 
sympathy with Lamb's saying about the un- 
fitness of "grace" from a mouth that waters. 
His prayers were natural words of reverence 
and aspiration, and his Sunday services simple. 
He made use of no baptism or confirmation; 
for, as he said in an early sermon, children 
needed not "to be consecrated by any other 
rite than nature's confirmation when she gave 
them birth." He had no "communion service", 
beyond the constant one of brotherly kindness 
which he preached and practiced. 

But this informality did not mean any lack 
of definite plan in his church work. One of 
his sermons that first summer was on "The 
Work of a Liberal Church." He represented 
such a church as true to Terence's saying and 
indifferent to "nothing that concerns human- 
ity." He laid out its work in five lines: in- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



27 



tellectual, both for its pleasure and because "a 
trained intellect is the indispensable founda- 
tion of a true and stable character;" moral, 
"foremost in order of importance ;" religious, by 
"a recognition of our oneness with the infi- 
nite;" social, for enjoyment and "syste- 
matic philanthropy and benevolence." He 
spoke particularly of the proper building for 
such work. He told how he had been im- 
pressed fifteen years before at the dedication 
of Cosmian Hall, with its combined pulpit and 
stage, and its idealized face of Jesus fronting 
that of Shakspeare in the frieze. He pictured 
the church of his ideal, its costly spire omit- 
ted ; its organ strains no longer mournful, but 
mingling martial notes with "sweet over-tones 
that fill the heart with peace and trust; " its 
"chancel floor ringing with the footsteps of 
happy children," and its "dividing altar-rail 
gone, not that the chancel is less holy, but the 
rest of the church more holy because all dedi- 
cated to whatsoever can make life larger and 
more true; " and its arrangements adapted to 



28 



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that varied work he had marked out, and for 
"our church home." He admitted that the 
world was not yet ready for this ideal church; 
but, said he, "I am confident that some por- 
tions of it are, and I am hopeful — I trust not 
too fondly so — that a fragment of this sort is 
to be found in this town of ours." 

It was found there, and was to realize his 
ideal much sooner and more richly than he had 
hoped. A family in his society, Captain and 
Mrs. Andrew Tainter, had some two years be- 
fore lost their loved daughter Mabel, in the 
beauty and bright promise of her youth. 
Thoughtful of the public needs and of her 
known feelings, they had decided to erect at 
some time in the future, as her fittest monu- 
ment, a building for a free library and other 
beneficent use. Moved partly by Mr. Maxson's 
thought — possibly by the very words above 
quoted— they decided that this monument should 
not wait, and soon began its erection. Month 
by month the walls rose and the elaborate 
plan unfolded, until the "Mabel Tainter Memo- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



29 



rial" overlooked the city, fair without and 
beautiful within, like an unfading flower to 
bring blessing to future generations and to re- 
main ever fragrant with the memory of that 
maiden and of her parents' generosity. On 
July 3, 1890, less than two years after Mr. 
Maxson pictured that ideal in his sermon, it 
stood realized in stone, and the city gathered 
to its dedication. There were the spacious 
auditorium and stage, the well-filled library 
and reading room, club rooms, rooms for every 
educational and social need, furnished with all 
conveniences and luxuries, rich with marble 
and mahogany, with carpets, rugs and tasteful 
drapery, the whole having cost some $120,000, 
and all given for the free service of the public 
and of "all classes on equal terms. " Mr. Max- 
son, on behalf of the donors, made the presen- 
tation speech transferring the building to the 
incorporators of the "Mabel Tainter Library, 
Literary and Educational Society," to be used 
especially by the Unitarian Society for char- 
itable and social work, and for "lectures, en- 



30 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



tertainments and services such as will quicken 
the intellect, strengthen the character, and 
fill the soul with glimpses of those larger re- 
lations which link us to the Infinite and the 
Eternal." Hon. S. W. Hunt replied in behalf 
of the incorporators, accepting the building 
and thanking its donors in the name of all who 
should be blessed by it, "as long as the morn- 
ing shall greet it with her light, or night 
crown it with her stars." Henceforth Mr. 
Maxson had a "Church Home," for his people, 
and in it a study for himself, which for con- 
venience and beauty were hardly anywhere sur- 
passed. 

His work had a wide influence upon the 
social and spiritual life of the city. His ser 
mons cleared and stimulated thought, and 
made feelings more human and reverent. His 
well-stored and disciplined mind, and his long 
experience as teacher, made him excel in S. S. 
work and in week-day classes and clubs for 
study. He was leader in the library and 
busy reading room. His work was especially 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



31 



seen in the "Memorial Club Rooms," which a 
club of 120 young men and boys frequented 
for evening amusement, and which he super- 
vised. He did not establish a rule there; yet 
he kept all these youths orderly in his pres- 
ence and absence by their respect and loyalty 
for him. His personal influence upon young 
and old was remarkable, and a close observer 
says that with all his power as preacher, he 
exerted more as pastor. He knew his parish- 
ioners intimately and formed a wide acquaint- 
ance outside; he visited the sick and needy 
regardless of their church relations; he pleased 
everywhere by his courtesy and genial humor; 
above all, he impressed people by his utter 
integrity, and inspired them by his love of 
good. He was not only an educator, but had 
pronounced views on education. He was a 
firm believer in and advocate of the Kinder- 
garten and Manual Training School. He found 
among his friends and parishoners at Menom- 
onie, one who was in full accord with him, 
and had he lived he would to-day witness the 



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realization of his own ideal in the erection of 
a grand Manual Training School by that friend 
for that city. 

At the same time with this work at Meno- 
monie, he carried on one hardly less remarka- 
ble at Eau Claire. He began it as a mission- 
ary movement, going there Sunday evenings 
to preach to a few persons in a hall. But it 
quickly grew into a permanent society, and 
in little over a year had a new and beautiful 
church built and dedicated. Though staying 
here only one day in the week, he had more 
influence than many a pastor in seven. Even 
the conductor of the freight train which carried 
him over felt it, and said : "Mr. Maxson does 
not talk religion, but somehow he makes you 
want to be better." He did make men better, 
whether he was speaking or silent, serious or 
merry. One of his best acquaintances in Eau 
Claire speaks especially of his merry nature 
and its healthy influence. She says : "He 
generally entered the house with a jest on his 
lips, and threw one behind him when he left. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



3b 



I think I never knew one with a keener sense 
of the ridiculous, a brighter wit or power of 
quick repartee. We got into the habit of 
keeping everything funny for Mr. Maxson." 
But his wit never weakened confidence in 
him. A critical friend said he had been look- 
ing for mistakes in the man, but had not found 
any, "he always says and does the right thing." 
A citizen of Eau Claire is said to have replied 
to an evangelist who asked if he knew the 
Lord Jesus Christ, "No, but I know Henry 
Doty Maxson." Mr. L. A- Doolittle, who 
tells these incidents, says Mr. Maxson had 
many disciples who, though unmoved by 
representations of the remote Nazarene, yet 
"reverently affirmed that they had seen face 
to face and knew a man so Christ-like that he 
rilled them with new aspirations and created 
within them a new ideal of perfect manhood." 

Much work he also did beyond those two 
cities. He was always busy, and to one ask- 
ing what he was studying that winter, replied, 
"studying how to get time to study." But in 



34 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



the little time he did get, he studied much 
and deeply. He wrote many a -careful article 
for the press. He prepared and published along 
and elaborate series of Sunday School lessons. 
He was an active officer of the Wisconsin and of 
the Western Unitarian Conferences. He was 
vice-president of the Wisconsin Academy of 
Sciences. He gave lectures and addresses at 
institutes and various meetings. In three years 
this modest minister of a Western lumber-town 
had come to be well known throughout his 
denomination, and to be heard with honor in 
eastern cities. 

His life of less than forty years had thus 
reached a rare fulness. That disappointment 
of his youth had only led to larger influence. 
In ten years of teaching he had done a wider 
work and won more esteem than most minis- 
ters in their lives. His less than four years 
in the ministry were richer in results and bet- 
ter than his boyhood's hopes His last faith 
was not only larger but firmer than his first. 
In one sermon he said: "It has been my lot 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



35 



to go through the gamut of religious expe- 
rience, from the conception of a God whose 
face I was some day to behold with the same 
definiteness as that of father or mother, to 
the conception of an infinite Power whom I 
can name only by figures of speech. But the 
very vagueness of the broader outlook gives it 
vigor. The thought of the Eternal fills me 
not only with deeper awe, but also with re-in- 
vigorated trust." In another he said, "We 
may feel sure that in the eternal economy of 
God no precious bit of human nature can ever 
be lost." Agnostic in thought, yet calm in 
this trust that no good thing can come to 
naught, he worked on with content, and pro- 
nounced these last years the happiest of his 
life. The fruits of his work faced him on all 
sides. Friends unnumbered admired and es- 
teemed him. His father and mother still lived ; 
and, had not only ceased to grieve for his 
changed faith, but found joy in accepting it. 
The wife whose tenderness had lightened 
his cares and sweetened so many years of his 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



life, was still spared to him; and their love 
for each other and for the daughter in whom 
their love had blossomed, filled their home with 
happiness. 

His life closed happily too. November 22, 
1891, he preached very impressively at Menom- 
onie the sermon entitled "How Much Does 
He Get?" and leaving home in the best 
of spirits, he went to Eau Claire for the usual 
evening service. There, in the Sunday-School, 
he wrote upon the blackboard (now covered 
with glass to keep the last words from his hand), 
the significant Hindu sentence, "He who has 
caused no fear to the smallest creature, has 
no cause to fear, when he dies." He again 
gave the sermon, closed the services, and, 
standing at the door, shook hands with his 
hearers as was his wont. He walked a few 
blocks with some friends, and then turned to 
his hotel, apparently in usual health. A few 
hours after, in a cerebral hemorrhage which 
had occurred more than once before, he gave 
up his breath, apparently without suffering or 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



37 



consciousness, in the fulness of his powers, 
as wise men wish. 

The news next day smote hearts in those 
two towns and many a distant city as if a 
brother had died. His body was borne back 
to that home out of which the light seemed 
gone forever, yet in which his love would still 
be a light divine. Four days later it was taken 
to that Memorial, and many hundreds gathered 
from near and far to see his face once more, 
and hear the sincere eulogies which yet praised 
him no more than did the sadness of the silent 
throng. Rev. S. M. Crothers called him "a 
man of absolute sincerity, clearness of sight, 
and courage to follow where his clear sight 
showed the way," a man who "walked these 
streets of yours and made them sacred places. " 
Rev. S. W. Sample called him "sincere all 
through," "intensely conscientious, yet withal 
so sweetly reasonable," "courageously radical, 
yet deeply reverent and devout." Rev. J. L. 
Jones said, "I too loved him; he filled out 
the measure of a magnificent life." Rev. Mila 



US 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



F. Tupper spoke tender and coasoling words 
in prayer, and again at the grave, where, 
among the pines and between the twilight 
torches, his body was laid to rest beneath 
flowers dropped by devoted friends, and snow- 
flakes falling like heaven's benediction. 

For many months words in his praise were 
spoken and printed. Miss Tupper, his inti- 
mate friend, told his life-story and its lessons, 
from her Michigan pulpit and in denomina- 
tional papers. Mr. Jones, in "Unity," speak- 
ing of the confidence Mr. Maxson had won 
both West and East, with radicals and conserv- 
atives alike, said "he carried that highest 
reconciling force, the superlative power of 
character." Mr. Forbush said, more winning 
than "his fine thought, his rare discrimination 
or his eloquent word was the man himself." 
Mr. Crooker recalled his face combining "both 
classic and saintly elements," and said: 
"What I find to admire in him, with a feeling 
akin to reverence, was his absolute intellectual 
integrity, his crystal-clear sense of justice, his 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



39 



unvarying tenderness of spirit." Mrs. Hattie 
Tyng Griswold said: "Never again shall we 
see a blending of such sweetness and such 
strength, of such courage and such modesty." 
Hon. H. M. Lewis wrote, "All of us loved and 
admired him." Wherever he had lived, the 
papers gave him sincere praise, and societies 
to which he had belonged recorded words in his 
honor. Before the Wisconsin Academy of 
Science, Prof. J. W. Stearns said that in Mr. 
Maxson's connection with it, "the transparent 
sincerity of the man and his complete devotion 
to the highest aims had made a strong impres- 
sion upon its members;" that "those who had 
but a slight acquaintance with him felt the 
charm of his character, while those who en- 
joyed his intimacy found in him the best inspi- 
rations of a noble manhood." At the next 
meeting of the Wisconsin Unitarian Confer- 
ence, a session was devoted to his memory. 
Mr. Hunt carefully reviewed his fruitful work 
and influence at Menomonie, described his 
rare qualites of mind and heart, and said 



40 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



they had "made an impression on the people 
that time cannot efface." Mr. Doolittle, for 
Eau Claire, spoke tenderly of the "elusive and 
subtle mystery of grace and beauty" in his life, 
of the "transcendent loveliness of his charac- 
ter that touched all hearts with aspiring sym- 
pathy, " and said they felt that "his personal 
influence was phenomenal, marvelous, divine. " 
This sheaf of tributes only represents the words 
or feelings of all who knew him well. 

The secret of his power and success is easily 
told. He was so true that people instinctively 
trusted him. He was so clear-headed and free 
from follies that he kept their confidence in- 
creasing. While fearlessly frank, he was so 
courteous and considerate that he made friends 
everywhere. By energy and industry he had 
acquired such knowledge and wisdom that 
people liked to listen to him and be led by 
him. To crown all, he was so unselfish and 
sympathetic that they loved him. Hence, 
too, his work has not ended. As the hands 
of that lost daughter still reached through a 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



41 



father's and mother's love, and built those 
beautiful walls at Menomonie; so Mr. Maxson 
works on through the love of his followers 
there and friends everywhere, and is still build- 
ing his Memorial in ennobled characters and 
enlarged lives. 



SERMONS 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 
OF AGNOSTICISM. 

The word "agnosticism" was invented by 
Prof. Huxley, to represent the view of those 
who regard the solution of some of the ulti- 
mate problems of existence as beyond the pos- 
sibilities of the human mind. In a late re- 
joinder to Mr. W. S. Lilly, Prof. Huxley has 
retold the story of the origin of this term. 
"Tolerably early in life," says he, "I discov- 
ered that one of the most unpardonable sins 
in the eyes of most people is for a man to go 
about unlabelled. The world regards such a 
person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, 
not under proper control. I could find no label 
that would suit me. So, in my desire to range 
myself and be respectable, I invented one, 
and, as the chief thing that I was sure of was 

that I did not know a great many things that 
45 



46 RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



the -ists and -ites about me professed to be 
familiar with, I called myself an agnostic." 

The word has taken on a more specific phi- 
losophic sense as descriptive of the view of 
Mr. Herbert Spencer, who insists that all the 
three theories respecting the origin of the uni- 
verse, — self-existence, self-creation, and crea- 
tion by an external power; the atheistic, the 
pantheistic, and the theistic, — are ultimately 
unthinkable; that they all, nevertheless, in- 
stead of being purely erroneous, contain a fun- 
damental verity; that, pursued to their last 
analysis they all alike lead the inquirer into 
the presence of an infinite, eternal mystery, 
ever pressing for solution, but ever insoluble. 
And to this he applies the term "The Un- 
knowable." Whether, in this ultimate analy- 
sis, the foundation of religion entirely disap- 
pears or, on the other hand, the contemplation 
of the Unknowable is still capable of awaken- 
ing emotions that may properly be denomi- 
nated religious, is a question that, it will be 
remembered, led to a decidedly trenchant dis- 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



47 



cussion between Mr. Spencer and Mr. 
Frederic Harrison, the most distinguished 
English expounder of Positivism; while 
the entry into the arena of several 
others prominent in both England and Ameri- 
ca has helped to keep alive public interest in 
the subject of that noteworthy controversy. 
A re-examination of the Spencer Harrison de- 
bate has convinced me that a considerable por- 
tion of it was due to a failure to agree upon and 
adhere to a definite meaning of the word "reli- 
gion." Let us try to avoid that mistake to- 
day. 

There is so general an association between 
religion and morality in the language and 
thoughts of men that it may reasonably be 
presumed to represent an actual association 
in human life. Thus, popular sentiments de- 
mands that the church member, the man who 
openly identifies himself with some religious 
organization, shall be exemplary in his moral 
character. Any marked departure from integ- 
rity and honor in his conduct is generally ac- 



48 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



cepted as seriously discrediting his religious 
professions. They are stigmatized as hollow 
pretence, mere sham, while he is visited with 
the opprobrium due to hypocrisy. This pop- 
ular judgment finds warrant in the definitions 
of religion put forward by eminent men. Mr. 
Matthew Arnold has called it "morality 
touched with emotion, " thus making it include 
morality as well as a cerain additional element 
which morality does not necessarily involve. 
Mr. Francis E. Abbot defines religion as "the 
effort of man to perfect himself," a character- 
ization which gives one an almost painful 
sense of conduct as the one predominant fact 
in religion. Instead of a picture of the soul 
basking m the restful warmth of the divine 
effulgence, there is suggested an unremitting 
struggle to realize in one's life and character 
the highest ideals of duty. "The world is my 
country, to do good my religion," said Thomas 
Paine. Here the emotional element of Mr. 
Arnold's definition quite disappears. To Paine, 
religion meant benevolent self-surrender in the 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



49 



interest of the common good, the extreme of 
altruistic morality. 

But it is unnecessary to multiply illustrations 
of the fact that morality is commonly regarded 
as a prominent feature in religion. While 
now, in the average mind, religion includes 
morality, it must also connote something be- 
sides morality, or at any rate the term would 
be superfluous. That it does stand, in com- 
mon usage, for an additional fact, one will not 
have to go far to learn. It is common, for in- 
stance, to hear a person spoken of as a very 
good but, unhappily, not a religious man. 
Sometimes, the same fact is expressed by the 
statement that he discharges all his duties to 
his fellows, but neglects his duties to God. 
Now and then, one discovers a feeling pain- 
fully akin to jealous regret that, while indiffer- 
ent to the claims of piety, he should unkindly 
persist in being so completely above reproach 
in all his external conduct and life. It is only 
the hopeless sectarian who will deny the pos- 
sibility of a genuine and thorough-going moral- 



50 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



ity in a man destitute, in the more compre- 
hensive sense of the word, of any religion at all. 
Let not this remark be construed as meaning 
that the fullest living is possible without re- 
ligion. But the gravest criticism that will lie 
against a man who possesses morality without 
religion is that he is an incomplete man, not 
that he is radically wrong or perverse. And 
let us be forever done with the disposition to 
deny to those of other faiths than our own, 
or" of no faith at all, or but stingily to recog- 
nize in them, the possession of whatever excel" 
lence a sympathetic eye can discern in their 
conduct or their character. 

If, then, morality, while ordinarily associat- 
ed with religion, constitutes only one element 
in it and is capable of existing independently 
of it, — or, stating the same fact from the op- 
posite direction, if the term "religion, " as or- 
dinarily employed, is more comprehensive 
than "morality," including it, but also some- 
thing besides, — what is this other element to 
which the word "religious" might be distinct- 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



51 



ively applied? Mr. Arnold, as already quoted, 
calls it "emotion." But this is not, of course, 
intended as an accurate definition; for there 
are possible all sorts of emotions, to only a 
limited class of which the term "religious" 
may be applied. What, now, is the distin- 
guishing characteristic in those acts and emo- 
tions which we call religious? Chryses, priest 
of Apollo, in Homer's story, goes to the Gre- 
cian camp with money in his hand, to ransom 
his captive daughter from the haughty Agamem- 
non; and we call this an ordinary, or, if you 
please, a secular transaction. Repulsed by the 
overbearing Greek, the father turns in his 
distress to his god, Apollo, and prays for as- 
sistance in reclaiming his child from her cap- 
tor's hands; and we call this act religious. 
Wherein lies the difference? In both cases, 
Chryses is seeking a certain end by not unu- 
sual means; but in the former he is dealing 
with known agents, in the latter with a being 
who, in the main, lives and moves in a field 
beyond the sphere of sense, in the realm of the 



52 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



unknown, the mysterious. The savage seeks 
to bury his arrow in his enemy's heart, while 
at the same time he performs various incanta- 
tions to bring down upon that enemy the ven- 
geance of the gods. We call the latter act a 
religious ceremony. What entitles it to that 
distinctive epithet but the fact that here the 
petitioner is seeking to avail himself of powers' 
which lie beyond the known, in the realm of 
mystery? In 1666, the people of London were 
to be seen falling upon their knees in impor- 
tunity that Jehovah would stay the plague 
which his wrath had sent them. In the nine- 
teenth century, those who are economical of 
their efforts have learned that the speediest 
way to drive pestilence from a crowded town 
is to give more careful attention to drainage 
and the water supply. Prayer has been replaced 
by sanitation; typhus is exorcised by cleanli- 
ness instead of genuflections. The means of 
amelioration have ceased to be religious. 
Causes which before had inspired the stricken 
populace with religious awe, because they lay 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



53 



shrouded within the veil of mystery, have been 
explored by science, have been brought with 
in the pale of the known; and religon, as ever, 
has retired from before the face of knowledge. 

Exactly what is it that awakens the religious 
sentiment in the Christian worshiper of to- 
day? Not that curiously minute tabulation 
of the attributes of God which the theologians 
have furnished him, and by which they seek to 
acquaint him with the Divine nature, very 
much as one comes to know Gladstone or Bis- 
marck or Boulanger through the correspondence 
columns of the newspaper press, but the con- 
sciousness that behind the petty delineations 
of a pretentious theology there stands a myste- 
rious Power, the depths of whose being no eye 
can penetrate, no tongue describe. So, too, 
the anticipations of a future life inspire relig- 
ious awe, — not by what is supposed to be 
known respecting it, but by that which is 
recognized as transcending knowledge. Could 
the New Jerusalem be located and depicted 
with the definiteness with which we learn of 



54 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



Paris or Berlin, it might not cease to be at- 
tractive, but it would cease to awaken the re- 
ligious veneration. Religion does not find its 
resting-place in the map and the guide-book. 
Is it not rather true that the thought of per- 
sonal immortality stirs the depths of one's re- 
ligious nature from the very fact that the im- 
agination is baffled in all attempts to localize 
it, while there stretch out on every hand the 
alluring mysteries of an inconceivable exist- 
ence? 

Unless, then, our analysis has been at fault, 
mystery is an essential feature of that portion 
of religion which lies outside of morality and 
is distinct from it. To affirm that all religion 
depends upon mystery is not, however, equiv- 
alent to saying that all mystery is capable of 
giving rise to religious emotions. It is con- 
ceivable that a race of men, unfamiliar with 
the scientific explanation of the rainbow, and 
regarding it, moreover, as a permanently in- 
soluble mystery, might remain unaffected by 
any higher emotion than wonder, so long as 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



55 



they did not regard that brilliant child of the 
sunlight as having any influence upon their 
own lives. But, whenever such a relation 
should be thought to exist, wonder would 
pretty certainly deepen into religious awe. 
The patch of color would be transformed into 
Iris, bright-winged messenger of the gods to 
men. And it is a striking testimony to the 
existence of a well-nigh universal sense of the 
solidarity (if I may use the phrase) of nature 
and man that no conspicuous natural phenom- 
enon has long remained outside the fields of 
both science and religion. 

We here reach a second element, which will 
be always found in company with mystery in 
any conception capable of awakening the re- 
ligious sense. Chryses worshiped Apollo, the 
savage addressed himself to his destroying 
deities, the people of London prostrated them- 
selves before Jehovah, the Christian turns to 
God in prayer and stands awe-struck in the 
presence of his conception of heaven, not sim- 
ply because these objects of adoration have 



56 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



been invested with mystery, but also because 
they have been thought closely and powerfully 
related to human interests. These two ele- 
ments — mystery and an intimate relationship 
to human interests — are conditions which will 
inevitably give rise to religion, and without 
which it cannot exist. Let me feel myself sur- 
rounded by an inscrutable mystery, which 
holds in its grasp the roots of my being, the 
issues of my life, and I must fall on my face 
in adoration; for I shall find myself in the 
awful presence of the unknown God. 

And now let us apply the foregoing analysis 
to our problem. It will be convenient to em- 
ploy the word "religion" to represent not all 
that is usually included under that term, but 
the additional element which it is necessary 
to add to morality to produce religion, — the 
"emotion" of Mr. Arnold's definition. Is Ag- 
nosticism capable of giving rise to that emo- 
tion, of awakening the religious sense? 

We have seen, or thought we saw, that re- 
ligion feeds upon the unknown, the mysterious. 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



57 



It flies from the face of knowledge. Science 
and religion are, I would not say antagonistic, 
but supplementary. They are unable to co- 
exist. They cannot occupy the same field. 
With the advance of the one, the other re- 
cedes. Optics dissolves Iris. J upiter Tonans 
disappears before electrical discovery. Med- 
ical science dethrones the Jehovah of the 
plague. If, then, all subjects of contemplation 
were capable of scientific solution, the death 
of religion would be only a question of time. 
What answer does the agnostic philosophy 
make as to this possibility? Not only that 
ever) 7 enlargement of the known still leaves 
one face to face with a great though decreasing 
expanse of the unknown, but that, if you thrust 
out into space the expanding circle of knowl- 
edge, by so much as you increase the area of 
that circle, you lengthen the circumference 
which marks off the endless realm of the un- 
known still awaiting solution. Nay, more: 
that, when investigation and analysis have 
done their utmost, the human soul, in the very 



53 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



nature of the case, must ever find itself in the 
awe-inspiring presence of an impenetrable 
mystery. Not only, says Agnosticism, is the 
ground work of religion not nearly exhausted: 
it is absolutely inexhaustible. 

Instead, then, of setting bounds to religion. 
Agnosticism but removes the bounds which 
the theologies have attempted to set. As al- 
ready stated, in so far as God and heaven 
come to be known, are brought within the 
possibilities of explicit description, to that 
extent do they cease to be food for the religious 
sense. Could the Augustines and Calvins of 
theological literature really succeed in making 
God appear as a well defined personality be- 
fore our minds, they would but undermine the 
sentiments which they are seeking to promote. 
Fortunately for religion, the finite cannot com- 
pass the Infinite. The anthropomorphism of 
religious terminology, the representation of 
God in terms applicable to human personality, 
has doubtless been a necessity, and has served 
an important purpose as a means of commu- 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



59 



nicating religious conceptions. Nor have I 
the slightest objection to the employment of 
those terms by any one who finds them useful 
in either expressing or promoting the emotions 
of his religious experience. What I contend 
for is that (to use Prof. John Fiske's descrip- 
tive term) the "deanthropomorphization" of 
God, divesting him of human attributes, far 
from dethroning him as an object of religious 
worship, is rather establishing his throne upon 
a more permanent foundation. As the human 
element in our conceptions of deity disap 
pears, the Divine makes itself felt in greater 
power and fulness. 

But let it be admitted that the theory of 
the Unknowable possesses philosophical valid- 
ity, and that the conception is capable of awak- 
ening the religious sentiment, the question re- 
mains: Is that sentiment' worth cultivating? 
Has a religion of the Unknowable any value 
for the human soul? Perhaps the most feasi- 
ble way of approaching the problem is through 
the question: Is the religious sentiment ever 



60 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



worth cultivating? Has any religion a value 
for the human soul? 

The intimate connection between religion 
and morality has already been acknowledged. 
But, while they may powerfully interact upon 
each other, they are separable in thought, and, 
if I mistake not, in fact. I have already been 
insisting upon the possibility of morality ex- 
isting independently of religion. It seems to 
me equally possible for religion to exist apart 
from morality. A man's emotions, it would 
appear, may be easily stirred by a contempla- 
tion of the mysterious powers with which his 
life is surrounded, while still but imperfectly 
responsive to the claims of equity in his rela- 
tions to his fellow-men. I have no desire to 
rehabilitate the characters of clerical criminals 
and saintly sinners whose falls from grace 
have brought discredit upon their religious 
professions. But, while I am not disposed to 
condone their offenses, I have no doubt that 
the charge of religious insincerity is often un- 
warranted. If I were to compare the value of 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



61 



morality without religion and religion without 
morality, I should unhesitatingly give my most 
pronounced preference for the former. I am 
not quite sure that I fully understand the fa- 
mous remark of Mr. Matthew Arnold, to the 
effect that conduct constitutes three-fourths of 
life. The statement has a curiously mathe- 
matical definiteness, which only a literary man 
would think of employing in so entirely un- 
mathematical a subject. But I have always 
had a feeling that somehow that statement 
must be true. We are never tired of quoting 
that pithy comment of Emerson, in reply to the 
hackneyed disparagement of morality in com- 
parison with religion: "'Mere morality'! as 
if one were to say, 'Poor God! with nobody to 
help him!'" Most assuredly, morality is en- 
titled to recognition in its own right, even 
without any religious robe to give the attract- 
iveness of spiritual grace to its own rugged ex- 
cellence. To an exalted morality, if to any- 
thing in the universe, is rightly due the ad- 
jective "divine." Yes, rather let the heavens 



62 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



above us be impenetrable brass, and no whis- 
per of the Eternal ever come to our eager 
souls, than that we fail to embody in our lives 
the highest ideals of duty to our fellow-men! 

But after conceding that, if religion and 
morality are to be dissociated and their rela- 
tive worth compared, the palm must be un- 
questionably awarded to morality, our question 
remains: Is the religious sentiment worth cul- 
tivating? Has religion any value for the hu- 
man soul? Does it profit a man to add relig- 
ion to morality? Let us waive for the moment 
the alleged utility of some forms of religion 
as a sort of insurance to protect against future 
loss from being nothing but a good man, and 
consider only the immediate effect of religion 
upon the soul. 

To the purely practical or scientific mind, 
Niagara is a certain volume of water pouring 
over a ledge of rock, and representing an ap- 
proximately calculable amount of mechanical 
force. The poet sees, perhaps, all this; but 
he sees much more. He sees the wondrous 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



63 



majesty of which that mass of falling water is 
the concrete embodiment, and he stands awe- 
struck before the inspiring spectacle. He sees 
the marvelous beauty of which those circling 
clouds of spray are the visible expression ; and 
that beauty steals into his soul, filling it with 
indescribable rapture. These two men are 
comparable, in a rude and approximate way, 
to the simply moral man and the man whose 
morality has been crowned and illuminated 
with religion. With the latter, knowledge 
clothes itself in a becoming humility ; life takes 
on a grander significance than is to be found 
in the allotted threescore years and ten; the 
soul is permeated with that indescribable in- 
spiration which comes alone from the contem- 
plation of the unknown God. The material 
Niagara of the man of affairs becomes the 
poet's avatar of beauty and sublimity. 

If it is true that the real source of all re- 
ligion is to be found in mystery, and that that 
mystery, instead of being dissipated, is deep- 
ened by the last word of the agnostic philos- 



64 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



ophy, then, as has already been claimed, Ag- 
nosticism, far from necessitating the abandon- 
ment of religion, offers it a securer foundation, 
Let us proceed with our question: Even 
though an agnostic religion may be possible, 
is it of any value? 

It is urged that the feeling of awe may be in- 
spired by a great variety of causes and closely 
associated with emotions decidedly diverse. 
There is an awe which includes a sense of love 
and trust, and there is an awe in which the 
characteristic associated emotions are fear and 
dread. I stand awe-struck in the midst of a 
gorgeous June day, whose warmth and light 
are not only filling my soul with cheer, but, 
in ways whose mysteriousness baffles my un- 
derstanding, are quickening into fresh activity 
and crowning with renewed promise all the 
channels of life that are flowing on around me. 
But, on the other hand, I stand awe-struck 
in the midst of the shafts of lightning that are 
working havoc on every hand and threatening 
myself and those I hold most dear with im- 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



65 



minent death. Now, if there lies at the cen- 
ter of the universe an impenetrable mystery, 
although it may inspire me with awe, there is 
no more reason, it may be said, for contem- 
plating it with love than with loathing, with 
trust than with fear; and therefore, though I 
may not be able to annihilate the mystery by 
ignoring it, why may it not be the part of 
wisdom, as far as in me lies, to shut it out 
from my soul, to confine my reflections with- 
in the realm of sense, and exercise my emo- 
tions solely on the knowable and the known? 

It must be acknowledged that there is ground 
for this criticism. Whether the religion of 
the Unknowable is to be productive of a 
pleasurable or a painful sense of mystery will 
depend upon whether one's view of life savors 
of optimism or pessimism, whether whatever 
comes within the pale of his knowledge whis- 
pers to him of hope or despair. If it is ever 
proper to make use of the tu quoqae argument, 
the agnostic may respond that there is the 
same diversity in other religions which have 



66 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



existed and still exist. It is a long way from 
Athens to Rome, from Zeus to Jupiter. Poly- 
theism, as a rule, seems to have begun not in 
a loving adoration of kindly powers, but in 
an effort to placate malevolent deities Na- 
ture was peopled with hostile gods and god- 
desses, whose enmity the worshiper sought to 
turn aside by various forms of flattery and 
self-sacrifice. As society progressed and stand- 
ards of character advanced, many of these 
superhuman beings took on more lovely traits. 
The polytheist's pantheon became hospitable 
enough for the reception of friends as well as 
enemies of the human race. Etruria gave 
place to Hellas, pessimism to optimism. 

The same marked contrasts are to be found 
in the various phases of Christian theism. 
Nothing could be imagined more irredeemably 
pessimistic than Calvinism. The larger part 
of the human race doomed by an irrevocable 
decree, for which they were in no way respon- 
sible, to endless torment — what more dismal 
picture of human destiny than this can any 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



67 



philosophy or faith present? Compared with 
it, the blank annihilation of the materialist 
upon whom so much patronizing pity is show- 
ered from every quarter, is as Hyperion to a 
satyr, Elysium to Tartarus. Happily, most 
Christians at the present time have more or 
less fully cut loose from this theistic pessi- 
mism. The Methodist moderates its ungainli- 
ness a little by making the sinner at least re- 
sponsible for his doom. Some of the Advent- 
ists, soften that doom by making immortality 
a divine gratuity, and death for the unrepent- 
ant "an eternal sleep." 

Our Andover friends think that, in some way 
which they but imperfectly understand or are 
not yet ready fully to explain, Christ will still 
be accessible in another life to the unbeliever 
who did not postively reject him in this. Even 
Rev. Joseph Cook comes forward with a subtle 
distinction between the historic and the essen- 
tial Christ, by which heaven is to make some 
farther inroads into hades. And the great 
mass of good men and women, who still adhere 



08 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



to a nominal Orthodoxy, show by the cheerful- 
ness of their demeanor that they do not really 
believe the future so black as it has been 
painted, and by the sweetness of their charac- 
ter that the God whom they worship in their 
inmost souls is not the ogre of the creeds. 

Agno sticism, it has been admitted, may lead 
to a sense of the mysterious, mingled with 
hope or despair accordingly as it is associated 
with a predominantly optimistic or pessimistic 
view of life But the same seems to be true 
of theism as well. Between the theism of 
John Calvin and that of the Liberal Christian- 
ity of our day there is "a great gulf fixed." Is 
it worth while for the pessimistic agnostic to 
be religious? J am not prepared to answer 
in a very confident affirmative. But is it any 
more worth while for the pessimistic theist to 
be religious? Well, religion with him may 
be demanded by a prudent regard for his future 
happiness. If the worship of a vindictive God 
be necessary to save the worshiper from his 
deity's retributive clutch, perhaps it is well to 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



69 



worship. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is best 
for a man to insure his future, even at the cost 
of some impairment of his manhood. But 
whether it is profitable thus to lose one's soul 
in order to save it, whether Paradise gained by 
sacrificing an esteem for what is thought ho- 
liest and loveliest in human character is prefer- 
able to manliness in Gehenna, it would be 
beside my purpose to discuss. What I am in- 
terested in endeavoring to make clear is that 
for the soul that finds a hopeful significance 
in human life there is spiritual profit in the 
reverent contempation of "The Eternal Not 
Ourselves that makes for Righteousness," 
whether that mysterious Power takes on the 
relatively definite form of the theist's God or 
remains the vague and shadowy conception of 
the agnostic's Unknowable. 

I have spoken of optimistic Agnosticism. Is 
not the phrase a self-contradiction? If at the 
very center of things persists an impenetrable 
mystery, am I warranted in associating with it 
either hope or despair, in entertaining towards 



70 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



it emotions of either trust or fear? Standing 
on the shores of an unknown and boundless 
ocean, while the waves are lashing the beach 
with destructive fury, I am filled with a sense 
of awe in the presence of this display of power. 
But a small portion of the expanse of water 
comes within the range of my vision. Of the 
rest I know and can know nothing. Now, the 
sense of mystery which comes to me, as my 
thoughts go out in the vain attempt to com- 
prehend the ocean in its entirety is blended 
with a feeling of fear on account of the de- 
structiveness of that portion which I can see; 
and I shrink in terror from the limitless pos- 
sibilities of ruin with which the unknown whole 
appeals to my emotions. 

Again, standing on the shore of an unknown 
and boundless ocean, while it stretches before 
my eyes in alluring peacefulness, its breezes 
messengers of refreshment to body and soul 
alike, I, as before, am filled with a sense of 
mystery. But that feeling is no longer blended 
with fear and terror. Those emotions have 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



71 



given place to trust and cheer. The myste- 
rious whole speaks to me in the language of 
that margin which lies within the limits of my 
vision. 

Apply the comparison to our problem. The 
"Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all 
things proceed" inspires me with an awful 
sense of mystery. But, as I examine the 
stream of things which comes within the 
range of knowledge, I find, or seem to find, 
that, notwithstanding frequent failures and 
relapses and occasions for temporary discour- 
agement, a wider view discloses the fact of a 
marked progress in the world of life, a marked 
advance in the evolution of human character. 
And so though I recognize the infinite signifi- 
cance of life as beyond the compass of my 
finite comprehension, still I am reassured with 
the conviction that there is an eternal purpose 
of good running through all things. And so, 
grounded in the Inscrutable Mystery, I not 
only fall on my face in reverent awe; I cheer- 
fully surrender myself in hopeful trust. 



72 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



And now let me disclaim any desire to de- 
personalize God in the mind of any one who 
finds comfort or inspiration in clothing him 
with human attributes. Provided we put into 
our conception the highest qualities of human 
nature, I can see no harm in enthroning that 
ideal at the heart of the universe, in identify- 
ing it with the Eternal Power which transcends 
the possibilities of human knowledge. What 
I am seeking to maintain is that Agnosticism, 
far from demanding the abandonment of relig- 
ion, furnishes it a more abiding foundation. 

What I have now offered has been in the 
main a series of reflections based upon per- 
sonal experience. Born and bred in one of the 
straitest of orthodox sects, I was trained to 
think and speak of the most abstruse religious 
conceptions with the definiteness and precision 
appropriate to mathematical formulas. Heaven 
was not only a condition, but a place; God 
was no abstraction, but a veritable personality, 
whom but for limitations in time and theo- 
ogical literature it would have been possible 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



73 



to know with the same intimacy and minuteness 
as one's next-door neighbor. As a conse- 
quence of the reflections forced upon my mind 
it became necessary to give up, one by one, 
many of the tenets of my early teaching. 
Some of them were surrendered without reluct- 
ance. They were, indeed, excluded from my 
mind through a growing perception of their 
radical inconsistency with attributes which I 
had been taught to ascribe to deity. Happily, 
1 had been led to form too high an ideal of 
God permanently to think him capable of the 
enormities attributed to him in the govern- 
ment of his creation. But while my senti- 
ments offered no obstacles to my intellect in the 
abandonment of some of the unlovely doctrines 
of the old belief, it was with no little regret 
that I saw the clear lineaments of the heav- 
enly Father's face fade into indistinctness, giv- 
ing place to that Inscrutable Mystery which 
the imagination cannot picture, which no 
tongue or pen can describe. And the questions 
would then force themselves upon my mind: 



74 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



Has the term "religion" any longer a place in 
my vocabulary? Has the fact any farther 
meaning to my soul? Those questions, in (I 
think) a judicial temper, with (I am sure) the 
utmost candor, I have been endeavoring to 
answer in your presence to-day. Ten years ago, 
on a public occasion, I remember to have 
quoted as expressive of my own attitude those 
beautiful lines of Alice Cary: — 

"I cannot plainly see the way, 

So dark the grave is; but I know, 

If I do truly work my day, 

Some good will brighten out of woe. 

"For the same hand that doth unbind 

The winter winds sends sweetest showers, 

And the poor rustic laughs to find 

His April meadow full of flowers. 

"I said I could not see the way, 

And yet what need is there to see, 

More than to do what good I may, 

And trust the great power over me?" 

The sentiment is a noble one. It still 
awakens a keen response in my heart. And yet 
it does not, I think, represent my attitude now 
quite so accurately as of old. There is in it a 



OF AGNOSTICISM 



75 



sort of under current of reluctant resignation, 
of which I do not seem to find the counter- 
part in my present experience. At any rate, 
the dark does not necessarily mean the dis- 
mal, the unknown is not synonymous with the 
forbidding. Jehovah is, indeed, gone; but 
that in Jehovah which made worship possible, 
the mysterious depths of the Divine nature 
which the plummet-line of human thought 
could not really pretend to fathom, — that 
abides. "The Infinite and Eternal Energy, by 
which all things are created and sustained," 
no longer speaks to my ear in articulate lan- 
guage from Mount Sinai ; but I seem to feel its 
influence pressing from every direction upon my 
soul. I would fain call it God, — a term which 
stands for a long line of spiritual experiences 
from which I have no anxiety to cut myself 
adrift; a term moreover, which seems to have 
previously represented a distinctive fact which 
has not been eradicated, but strengthened by 
my later thinking. However, I am not partic- 
ular about terms. I am rather gratified to 



70 



RELIGIOUS POSSIBILITIES 



find that the fact remains. Should, indeed, 
loyalty to the truth ever demand the sacrifice 
of what now seems "fact, " I hope that with 
the utmost promptness and cheerfulness I 
shall make the final surrender, and give up 
religion as one of the unsubstantial fancies of 
childhood. That time does not appear to have 
yet come in my experience. And, meauwhile i 
in the presence of that Power which passes the 
possibilities of delineation, I would bow in 
reverent awe, and not unloving trust. 



AM I MY BROTHERS' KEEPER? 



Romans xiv: 6. None of us liveth to himself and none 
dieth to himself 

As regards guiding our lives and quickening 
our best impulses, Bible texts are of four 
kinds. The first kind has no power to guide 
and quicken us. The "unwise," it has been 
well said, "value every word in an author of 
repute." This has been the great blunder of 
modern Protestantism. It has valued every 
word in the Bible. It has made the book a 
fetish. All parts have been counted equally 
sacred. The superstitious have used it in tell- 
ing fortunes by opening it at random to let their 
finger fall on whatever verse it chanced to hit, 
expecting thence to read the riddle of the 
morrow. Preachers have treated it with the 
same undiscriminating idolatry, offering to 
take as a text whatever passage any man might 
select, even such as the specifications of the 

Tabernacle as given in Exodus, or Ezra's list 
77 



78 AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 

of the men who went back with him from 
Babylon to Jerusalem. 

Again, there are texts which taken as they 
stand would guide our lives badly and quicken 
not our best but our worst impulses. The 
barbarous law by many people still supposed 
to have been given by Moses, "Thou shalt not 
suffer a witch to live," was largely responsible 
for the bloodiest episode in the history of New 
England. Paul's repeated injunction to ser- 
vants to be obedient to their masters helped 
mightily the interests of slavery in America 
half a century ago, just as his injunctions to 
wives to be obedient to their husbands are 
helping to maintain subjection of women. And 
if we were not to steel our hearts against their 
influence, it would be perilous to read many of 
the Psalms. Psalm cxxxvii: 8:9: "O daugh- 
ter of Babylon who art to be destroyed, 
happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as 
thou hast served us. Happy shall he be that 
taketh and dasheth thy little ones against 
the stones." These are commonly supposed to 



AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



79 



be the words of David. He certainly was a 
very brutal king. Fortunately for his reputa- 
tion, however, we have no good reason to be- 
lieve that he wrote this Psalm. "Happy shall 
he be who rewardeth thee as thou hast served 
us. 1 A long step from that revengeful spirit 
to the noble words of Jesus, "Love your ene- 
mies, do good to them that hate you, bless 
them that curse you, pray for them that de- 
spitefully use you." 

This brings me to the third class of texts, 
those that speak the universal language of the 
soul. These texts are as true and good to-day 
as they were a thousand years ago; they w.ill 
be as true and good a thousand years to come 
as they are to-day. Of this sort are those 
sweet sayings of Jesus which always guide hu- 
man life aright and quicken the best impulses 
of the heart; or Micah's high truth, "What 
doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, 
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with 
thy God: " or Paul's eulogy of love in the im- 
mortal thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. 



80 AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



In the fourth place, there are texts which 
can be helpful in guiding our lives and quick- 
ening our best impulses, but need first to be 
translated from the language in which they 
were written and from the conditions of their 
time, into the language and conditions of to- 
day. Of this sort is the verse which I have 
taken as my text this morning: "For none of 
us liveth to himself, and none dieth to him- 
self." 

When the Epistle to the Romans was writ- 
ten there was a sharp controversy among the 
early Christians. One party, the party of 
James and Peter, wished to retain many of 
the observances of the old Jewish law as a 
part of Christian worship. The other party, 
that of Paul, desired to let drop these observ- 
ances. As was quite natural, many in James's 
party wished not only the privilege of observ- 
ing these old Jewish laws themselves, but also 
they wished to compel the other party to ob- 
serve them. Just so, many of Paul's followers 
wished not only to be exempt from observing 



AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



81 



these laws themselves; they wished to pro- 
hibit all others from observing them. Paul 
himself, however, writing his epistle to the 
Romans, stood for personal liberty. This is, 
said he, an individual matter; let every man 
decide for himself in the sight of God what 
he will do; and let him concede an equal free- 
dom to his neighbor. "One man hath faith to 
eat all things; but he that is weak eateth 
herbs; let not him that eateth set at naught 
him that eateth not ; and let not him that 
eateth not judge him that eateth; for God hath 
received him. Who art thou that judgest the 
servant of another? to his own lord he stand- 
eth orfalleth." And again says Paul: "One 
man esteemeth one day above another; an- 
other esteemeth every day alike; let each 
man be fully assured in his own mind." Paul 
was no advocate of Sabbath legislation. Do 
you think he says in substance, "that all the 
days of the week are alike, that it is just as 
much your duty to work on Saturday as on 
Friday, that any pastime proper on Monday 



82 



AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



is just as proper on Sunday, do you think in 
that manner? Very well, decide for yourself; 
you will have to take the consequences of your 
own conduct, stand or fall before your own 
master. Let each man oe fully assured in his 
own mind. Some of us in these days seem 
to feel that the thing of which we need to be 
fully assured is not so much what we shall do 
as what other people shall do. We anticipate 
hearing some such conversation as this before 
the bar of the Eternal at the .great judgment 
day: "Mr. Smith, tell us something about 
your neighbor, Mr. Brown; how did he spend 
Sunday?" "Not as I would have liked to have 
him," replies Mr. Smith; "I have several times 
seen him planting potatoes on Sunday, and 
once I even caught him watching a ball game." 
"What," continues the Judge, "and you didn't 
stop him?" "Well, no," replies Mr. Smith, 
"I advised him not to do it; I told him it 
seemed to me that there was a better use to 
be made of Sunday than that; but I could not 
convince him, and so I went to church and 



AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



S3 



Sabbath-school myself and left him to do as 
he liked." Then comes the stern sentence, "De- 
part from me, Mr. Smith, into the eternal fire 
prepared for the man who does not use the 
whole police force of the government in com- 
pelling his neighbors to do what he thinks 
they ought to do." This was not the theory of 
Paul. "Let every man be fully assured in his 
own mind," said he. 

But while the great apostle to the Gentiles 
stood for personal liberty, he did not stand for 
personal caprice. While he said, Let every 
man decide for himself, he did not say, It 
makes no difference how you decide. It may 
make all the difference in the world; yes, in 
this world and the next. "For none of us 
liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself: 
for whether we live, we live unto the Lord, 
or whether we die, we die unto the Lord: 
whether we live therefore, or die, we are the 
Lord's; * * * for we shall all stand before the 
judgment-seat of God." I wish to translate 
this thought from the language of Paul's 
theology into the language of ours: 



84 



AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



Live and die, said Paul, as seemeth to you 
to be right; yet remember that none of us 
liveth to himself and none dieth to himself 
but in every moment of life and death you are 
under the eye of God, — God who sits en- 
throned in the Heavens, who will yet call you 
before his judgment-seat and according to your 
life and death will determine your eternal des- 
tiny. 

Let me repeat in my vocabulary the thought 
of Paul. Live and die as seemeth to you to 
be right. Yet remember that none of you liv- 
eth to himself and none dieth to himself, but 
in every moment of life and death you are 
offering some sort of service good or bad to the 
God who finds his highest expression in human- 
ity; the God whom you truly worship when 
you help make the lives of your fellows hap- 
pier, larger, better; the God before whose 
judgment-seat you stand condemned when by 
word or deed you injure or pervert one human 
life or by indolence or by silence you withhold 
any possible service from your fellows. 



AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



85 



In my talks to you on Prohibition, on Na- 
tionalism, on Sunday laws, I have opposed 
any attempt to restrict any one's liberty, in so 
far as the exercise of that liberty does not di- 
rectly (note the word, directly) interfere with 
the enjoyment of an equal measure of liberty 
by everybody else. I have reached this view 
because it seems to me that the largest possi- 
ble personal liberty will yield the largest and 
best living. But while in the exercise of this 
personal liberty I may commit many sinful acts 
that will not directly interfere with my neigh- 
bor's liberty, I can never, even in the utmost 
seclusion, commit a single sinful act which 
does not indirectly work my neighbor harm, 
I have before pleaded for the largest possible 
individual liberty. I want to quicken if I can 
this morning the sense of that tremendous 
responsibility which this individual liberty 
imposes. Every word and deed of us is a 
center from which proceed concentric waves 
of influence destined never to disappear en- 
tirely in the aeons of eternity. Every good 



86 AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



word which you or I might utter, but do not, 

every good deed which we might do, but do 

not, is so much happiness or virtue withheld 

from the common stock of the race. Every- 

bad word and deed is a contribution to the 

world's misery and vice. 

"We scatter seeds with careless hand, 
And deem we ne'er shall see them more; 

But for a thousand years 

Their fruit appears 

In weeds that mar the land, 

Or healthful store. 

"The deeds we do, the words we say, 
Into still air they seem to fleet, ' 

We count them ever past; 

But they shall last; 

In the great Judgment they 

And we shall meet." 

One distinguishing characteristic of ad- 
vanced thought is a recognition of the reign 
of law Accident, chance, caprice, have no 
place in modern science. Things do not hap- 
pen; they are caused. There is still much 
mystery, but no miracle. According to the 
old Hebrew legend in the book of Judges, 



AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



when Gideon was preparing to fight the Mid- 
ianites and Amalekites, he put a fleece of wool 
on the threshing floor. In the morning the 
fleece was drenched with dew, while the ground 
all about was dry. The next morning the 
case was reversed, the ground was wet while 
the fleece was dry. Gideon accepted this ex- 
traordinary performance on the part of the 
dew as an assurance that God would help him 
against his enemies. If so strange a thing 
were to occur now, we should conclude not 
that some supernatural power, some miracle- 
working God, had interfered, but that the nat- 
ural conditions had somehow changed; and 
even if we did not succeed in finding out what 
the change was, we should feel assured of the 
existence of some law which, if we could only 
v discover it, would explain the phenomenon. 
Every event must have a cause, and in turn 
every event must become a cause and produce 
some other event as an effect. Strange," re- 
marked a farmer to his neighbor, "strange how 
wet it is!" "It would be stranger still," re- 



88 AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



plied the rationalistic neighbor, "if it were 
dry with such heavy rains." 

This natural law of causation, by which 
every event is the consequent of some ante- 
cedent and becomes in turn the antecedent of 
some new consequent, applies just as fully to 
human life as to the phenomena of physics. 

"We scatter seeds with careless hand 
And deem we ne'er shall see them more. 

But for a thousand years 

Their fruit appears 

In weeds that mar the land, 

Or heathful store." 

And not only shall we be summoned, as 
Paul thought, to a personal judgment, not 
only is it true that we are bearing and must 
ever bear in our own bodies and souls the con- 
sequences of our conduct; also it is true that 
the consequences of our conduct are making 
themselves felt for good or ill, for health or 
disease, for virtue or vice, in the lives of our 
fellows. From this tremendous responsibility 
there is no escape. It is impossible to isolate 
oneself entirely, to stand alone and apart. As 



AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



89 



long as we remain in society, so long, even in 
spite of ourselves, must we be efficient agents 
in helping determine what that society shall 
be. 

Yes ; and solitude will not bring us release. 
Take if you please, the wings of the morning, 
fly to the center of the densest of jungles 
where you shall never again be met by human 
eye or feel the touch of human hand. Yet by 
your very withdrawal have you robbed the 
world of that contribution of strength and 
character which it is your solemn duty to make 
as a personal offering on the altar of human- 
ity. None of us liveth to himself, and none 
dieth to himself. 

You will find in the dictionary a word which 
is not many years old in English, a word 
which we have adopted from the French. We 
have been forced, as it were, to adopt it be- 
cause it stands with a precision with which no 
other word in the language stands for the 
common, the inextricably interwoven interests, 
of the human race. The word is solidarity. 



90 



AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



It means our community in gain or loss, in 
honor or dishonor, our being, so to speak, "all 
in the same boat." Solidarity! It is the 
modern translation of our text, "None of us 
liveth to himself and none dieth to himself." 

Perhaps the most startling development of 
this truth that men do not stand entirely alone 
in the world, is found in the modern doctrine 
of heredity. Not wholly but largely, we are 
what our fathers and mothers made us. Not 
wholly but largely, coming generations shall be 
what we permit them to be. And this inher- 
itance does not always pass directly from father 
to son. There sometimes occurs what the 
scientists call a reversion to the original type. 
A grandfather or great-grandfather or more re- 
mote and forgotten ancestor reappears in some 
descendant after the lapse of several interven- 
ing generations. The "Popular Science Month- 
ly" for February, 1889, contains a remarkable 
article by Doctor T. D. Crothers on "New Facts 
in Alcoholic Heredity." The author gives sev- 
eral well authenticated cases in which men 



AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



91 



who themselves never drank a drop of alcoholic 
liquor, but some of whose ancestors were 
drunkards, in periods of excitement have been 
disabled for labor, and given every appearance 
of being thoroughly intoxicated. I had known 
before, as everybody knows, that a craving 
for alcohol could be bequeathed. This article 
brought before my mind a new and most ter- 
rific comment on the evils of intemperance in 
the fact that entirely apart from the craving 
and the use, a thoroughly temperate or even 
a totally abstaining child might inherit from 
an inebriate ancestor that peculiar nervous de- 
moralization which intemperance produces. 
A child may be drunk without ever drinking. 
It is often the children's teeth that are set on 
edge when not they but their fathers eat the 
sour grapes. Whatever unhappy legacy any 
one may have received from father or mother, 
let him not be willing to make still more un- 
happy the legacy of son or daughter yet to be 
born. Heredity — it is another modern trans- 
lation of our text, "None of us liveth to him- 
self and none dieth to himself." 



92 AM I MY BRO THER ' S KEEPER ? 



Nor will abstinence from parentage release 
us from the responsibility of our social life. 
Through various channels do our words and 
deeds influence the lives of our fellows. The 
past few years have brought to our attention 
previously undreamed of subtle ways in which 
I may become my brother's keeper. I mean 
the phenomena involved in mind reading and 
mind cure and Christian science and hypno- 
tism and so on. These phenomena have not 
yet been studied with sufficient care and com- 
pleteness to justify us in drawing confident 
conclusions as to their character. Just now 
we are deluged with a great deal of rash ob- 
servation and reckless reasoning. But this 
much, at any rate, is already well established, 
that in some mysterious fashion, without the 
use of uttered word, mind may speak to mind; 
without any visible or tangible chain of com- 
munication, soul may appear to soul. Thus 
also are our more mystical speculations add- 
ing their confirmations of the truth, that "none of 
usliveth to himself and none dieth to himself. " 



AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



03 



I was reading a few days ago a remarkable 
book in which the author reminds us that we 
have no reason to think of an atom as a hard 
and solid something with its definite little 
limits. An atom is but a centre of force, a 
centre of force which has no limits. My friends, 
you and I are social atoms. We are centres 
of social force, centres from which there is rad- 
iating in all directions and evermore an influ- 
ence that knows no end in space or time. Thus 
does human society realize the famous defini- 
tion of infinity, a circle whose centre is every- 
where, its circumference nowhere. Let us 
gladly accept this fundamental fact in our so- 
cial life. Let us turn to the tasks which the 
solidarity of the race imposes, not depressed 
with the fear of the endless harm we may do, 
but inspired with the thought of the endless 
good we may do. 

The story goes that good old Father Taylor, 
the famous sailor preacher of Boston, once in 
a prayer so far forgot himself in his sympathy 
with a neighbor's needs that he poured out his 



94 



AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 



soul in a startling fashion: "O Lord," he 
prayed, "O Lord, we are a widow with six 
children." So may we forget ourselves in an 
enthusiastic devotion to the interests of others. 
Realizing that none of us liveth to himself and 
none dieth to himself, may we so live and die 
as to help make our neighbors' lives happier 
and their deaths more blest. 



SYMPATHY. 



Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; 
them that are evil entreated, as being yourselves also in the 
body. — Hebrews xiii, 3. 

My subject is Sympathy; or, to be more 
specific, Sympathy as a Source of Strength. 

There are two sorts of sympathy, a sympa- 
thy for and a sympathy with. 

I say, for instance, I have a great deal of 

sympathy for my unfortunate neighbor. He 

has met with some reverse in business and the 

wolf is at the door; or some sudden disease 

has befallen him; or the death angel has passed 

this way and the loved son or daughter breathes 

no more. That is, I who have never known 

poverty and always been strong and well, 

while my little ones still play about my knee, 

have a sympathy for my neighbor in his 

hunger and sickness and sorrow. This is the 
95 



96 



SYMPATHY 



sympathy for. It is another name for pity, 
and it is a worthy feeling. 

"He who needeth love, to love hath right." 
And one likes to believe, with Longfellow, 
that somewhere in the world this right is re- 
spected, somewhere this sympathy felt: that 

"No one is so accursed by fate 

No one so utterly desolate, 
But some heart, though unknown, 

Responds unto his own." 

We can never have too much of the sym- 
pathy for, even though the object of that sym- 
pathy, that pity, is degraded in character as 
well as unfortunate in condition. 

" He to the right can feel himself the truer, 
For being gently patient with the wrong, 

Who sees a brother in an evil doer, 

And finds in love the heart's-blood of his song." 

Buddhism ages ago insisted on kindness to 
animals: but with us Christians one of the 
advance steps that have been taken in this 
century is a recognition of the rights of all be- 
ings to the largest possible measure of hap- 
piness. Our pity., our sympathy for no longer 
stops with the boundary line of humanity but 



SYMPATHY 



97 



takes in every creature with nerves sensitive to 

pleasure or pain. We are learning 

"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels." 

We can never, I say, have too much of pity, 
of sympathy for. It is a worthy feeling. But 
it is relatively superficial. It does not reach 
down to the roots of the soul. It is only as I 
have been pinched with hunger that I can re- 
ally appreciate the sufferings of my starving 
neighbor. It is only as the winds of adversity 
have at some time shattered my house that I 
can really know what such a calamity means. 
It is only as I too have been compelled to 
yield to the grave one who was bone of my 
bone and flesh of my flesh — only thus that my 
neighbor' s tears can dim my eyes with thor- 
oughly responsive drops. 

This brings us to the sympathy with, the 
real sympathy ; for this is the etymological 
meaning of our word, a feeling with. Of this 
I wish this morning particularly to speak. 

Sympathy with. It is the soul of fellowship 



98 



SYMPATHY 



of comradeship. Without something of this 
sentiment, life would not be worth the living. 
Yes, it would be impossible to live. To know 
that we are not alone in the world is as essen- 
tial to life as the air that we breathe. The 
prisoner who is subjected for any great length 
of time to solitary confinement, goes mad. The 
human reason breaks down under the strain of 
mental desolation. Some of you have read in 
the writings of George Kennan, and in other 
accounts of prison life in Russia, of the la- 
borious and ingenious ways which prisoners 
have devised to relieve the torture of their 
solitude. One raps upon the wall of his cell. 
After many trials there comes an answering 
rap. He invents an alphabet and experiments 
with it. Finally his respondent guesses it. 
One rap means A, two raps means B, and so 
on. Having hit upon this tedious way of talk- 
ing, they desire abbreviations, and eventually 
there is produced a prison language by which 
these unfortunate men are able to send some 
pulsations of sympathy through the unfeeling 



SYMPATHY 



09 



stone and so keep their hearts from breaking. 
We must sympathize with one another or die. 
Though garrulousness may at times be tire- 
some, there is genuine philosophy in the con- 
duct of the woman who, not having had any 
callers in her own house for half a day or so, 
rushed into her neighbor's parlor with the ex- 
clamation: "I feel that I must talk to some- 
body." That was a wise Frenchman who after 
showing at much length how delightful solitude 
is added, "if you only have some one to talk to 
about its delightfulness. " 

What is the eagerness of my child to tell 
me something that she knows I already am 
informed of, but a tribute to our common 
craving for sympathy? 

But there may be isolation even in a crowd. 
There may be solitary confinement even with 
a multitude jostling our elbows. Many of us, 
my friends, are starving our souls by not living 
enough in one another's lives. Lord Bacon 
wrote: "There is no man that imparteth his 
joys to his friend but he joyeth the more; and 



100 



SYMPATHY 



no man that imparteth his grief to his friend 
but he grieveth the less." 

My subject was suggested to me a few weeks 
ago as I sat in this room at a concert. I 
looked around the audience and specu]ated as 
to their mental attitude. Are they, I asked 
myself, sympathetic or critical? Are they 
taking notes of the singer's defects and mis- 
takes, or are they seeking to feel with her, to 
be carried along in that stream of sentiment 
which she is seeking to express? Now there 
is a proper field for criticism, as well as sym- 
pathy. I. who know not anything about such 
matters myself, need the advice of some mu- 
sical critic who will unsparingly pass judg- 
ment on the execution of a violinist, we will 
say, and so be able to tell me whether it is 
worth while to go hear him when he comes to 
town again. But what I want you to note is 
that one can take the attitude of a critic at a 
concert only at the sacrifice of some personal 
profit and satisfaction. The only way for me 
to get the greatest possible good out of such 



SYMPATHY 



101 



an entertainment is to put myself into sympa- 
thy, into feeling with it. It is thus only that 
we can drink in those emotions which it is the 
purpose of the music to awaken. When I turn 
critic, I incur some personal loss. I might 
add that to play successfully the role of a critic 
one needs a large vein of sympathy. True 
criticism consist not merely in making a cata- 
logue of defects; rather in noting excellences, 
and then comparing this list of excellences 
with the ideal standard. Longfellow makes 
Michael Angelo say: 

"This is no longer 
The golden age of art. Men have become 
Iconoclasts and critics. They delight not 
In what an artist does, but set themselves 
To censure what they do not comprehend." 

The healthful attitude which we need in 
order to draw strength from our fellows, is one 
not of criticism but of sympathy; for in order 
to note excellences one must put himself into 
a mood of sympathy. 

The unprofitableness of that intercourse 
which is lacking in sympathy is well illus- 



102 



SYMPATHY 



trated by the average discussion on the street. 
The next time you have opportunity, do not 
take part yourself, but closely observe a con- 
versation between a democrat and a republican 
who are talking of politics, or between a Uni- 
tarian and some other congregationalist who 
are talking of religion. In nine cases out of 
ten you will find these two men are speaking 
different languages. Each begins with certain 
assertions, and then instead of making any 
effort to understand or appreciate the other's 
thoughts is wholly absorbed in the effort to 
maintain and defend his own. They keep 
each other at arms' length. Their conversa- 
tion is comparable to a battle between two 
forts. Each commander seeks to prevent his 
opponent from getting inside of his own de- 
fences and so finding out how he really is sit- 
uated. That is the style of the average con- 
versation. It is a debate. There is no profit 
worth mentioning in a debate — no profit for 
the participants. There may be some fun or 
enlightenment for the by-standers. In a de- 



SYMPATHY 



103 



bate there is no s}^mpathy; but to get any 
profit out of a conversation with you, I must 
sympathize with you. Not necessarily agree 
with you; but for the time feel as you feel, 
let my mind run as yours is running, look at 
the question from your point of view, and so 
be able really to appreciate your views and 
intelligently compare them with my own. So 
I speak cf sympathy with you as a source of 
strength to myself. 

Let us conceive a simple and profitable con- 
versation. It is not two forts engaged in a 
duel of artillery. Rather it is two neighbors 
visiting one another in their respective homes. 
Each goes freely through the other's house 
and puts himself into sympathy with his life. 
He may still like his own home best, and go 
back convinced that his neighbor is making 
some great mistakes in living as he does. But 
at least he finds out how his neighbor lives. 
He comes to understand why his neighbor is 
the kind of man that he is. 

I have said that I cannot get the greatest 



104 



SYMPATHY 



possible good out of a musical concert unless 
I put myself into sympathy with the perform- 
ers; and this statement is true, with a certain 
important qualification, of a lecture. I crave 
your sympathy as I speak to you this morning, 
as I speak to you from week to week in this 
room. I congratulate myself that as a rule I 
get your sympathy. Do not understand that 
I am asking you to agree with me. That is 
quite another matter. What I ask is that you 
will not bombard my house, but come in and 
look it over and see for yourselves what man- 
ner of house I live in. I should be rather 
sorry to learn that you all agreed with me in 
everything. Not, of course, that I have any 
doubt about my always being right: but if 
you all agreed with me in everything, I should 
feel confident that you were in some cases 
merely. accepting my opinions because I hold 
them, instead of first coming really to under- 
stand them and then accepting them because 
they semeed to you to be true. 

There are two about equally fatal mistakes 



SYMPATHY 



105 



between which we should steer a middle course. 
These are, on the one hand, isolating our- 
selves, on the other hand, annihilating our- 
selves. The man who seeks to live by him- 
self, without any sympathy with the life of 
his fellows, is a plant pulled up by the roots 
and then bidden in its own self-sufficiency to 
put forth bud and blossom and leaf. The 
man who surrenders his own individuality and 
allows himself to become the slavish disciple 
of another, living or dead, even though that 
other bear the tender and venerable name of 
Jesus of Nazareth — such a man is a stick swept 
along by the current and at last embedded in 
the mud at the mouth of the stream, to undergo 
a slow and inglorious decay. The man who, 
while respecting his own independent manhood, 
reaches out with the arms of sympathy to draw 
strength from the life of his fellows, is yonder 
lusty oak whose branches drink in the light of 
heaven from ^bove, whose roots feed on the 
soil beneath, while in noble self-assertion the 
tree braces itself against the fury of all the 
winds that blow. 



106 



SYMPATHY 



You remember that, in Shakespeare's play, 
when Polonius, the father of Ophelia, bids 
Hamlet go to speak with the queen, "Do you 
see," says Hamlet, "do you see yonder cloud, 
that's almost in shape of a camel." "By the 
mass," replies Polonius, "and 'tis like a camel 
indeed." Hamlet: "Methinks it is like a 
weasel." Pol.: 'It is backed like a weasel." 
Ham.: "Or, like a whale." Pol.: "Very like 
a whale." So some of us, Polonius-like, are 
content to see with other people's eyes and 
accept the results of their seeing. That is 
discipleship. I plead not for that, but to 
stand with open minds where other people 
stand, to see with our own eyes the things 
which they see with theirs. This is sympathy. 
For this I plead. 

You remember the oft quoted story of the 
shield, one side of gold, the other of silver. 
The first knight looked on one side and said: 
"I swear the shield is silver." The second 
looked on the other side and said: "I swear 
the shield is gold." So, back and forth they 



SYMPATHY 



107 



gave the lie, challenged each other, fought 
and died. That is the method of debate. Does 
some other man say that my silver shield is 
golden? I may take his word for it and call 
it golden too. That is the method of disciple- 
ship. Does he say that my silver shield is 
golden? Then I may seek to find out why he 
says so. For this purpose I take my station 
at his side, looking not with his eyes but with 
my own eyes to see what his eyes see. That 
is the method of intellectual sympathy, the 
method which enables us to enter into the life 
of our fellows and draw truth and strength 
therefrom. And it often turns out that I was 
not wrong, yet not entirely right; or that my 
neighbor was not right, yet not entirely wrong. 

Deeper and more important than the intel- 
lectual sympathy which enables me to think 
as my neighbor thinks, to see the things he 
sees, is that moral sympathy which enables 
me to put myself into conscious harmony 
with the best impulses of his character. My 
friends, you and I cannot afford to lose that 



108 



SYMPATHY 



help and inspiration which comes from a con- 
scious comradeship in the things of the soul. 
Herein is the justification of the advice al- 
ways to take our neighbors, not at their worst 
but at their best. We ourselves need their 
best. Even in the ugliest face there are some 
lines of beauty. Seek them out. Even in the 
grossest character there are some germs of 
grace. Encourage your heart to aspire by the 
assurance that it is not alone, either in its 
aspirations or its difficulties. Caged in as I 
sometimes find myself by the hard walls of 
circumstance, the imprisonment of the flesh, 
let me seek the encouragement of that answer- 
ing rap which tells me that in some other cell 
a soul like mine is earnestly longing for the 
liberty of a larger and better life. 

The highest word is yet unspoken, jesus 
of Nazareth sustained himself in the midst of 
suffering and disappointment by the thought 
of that Father in Heaven with whose eternal 
purpose he felt his own desires to be in sym- 
pathy — that Father who took note even of the 



SYMPATHY 



109 



sparrow's fall; that Father who held his hu- 
man children in still higher regard, and would 
therefore bring at last to a worthy fruition the 
labor of all who worked in harmony with his 
will. The language of Jesus does not quite 
fit the more advanced thought of to-day. We 
turn our telescopes to the sky and find no 
warm and welcoming Heaven. Only space, and 
space, and endless space. We turn our eyes 
to the world about us and the Father's face 
we seem to miss. The sparrow falls, and no 
unseen hand gives it loving burial. The wind 
blows down the poor man's corn; clouds burst 
and show no pity; the thunderbolt crashes 
alike through the home of sinner and of saint. 
Yes, Heaven seems gone, and the Father too 
— gone! But gone as my child went whom I 
see no more because the grave has closed over 
her? Or gone as that other child is going, 
whom, if fate shall be more kind, I shall see 
no more because lost in the larger life of wo- 
manhood? The God in whom I believe to-day 
I call Father more seldom than of old, not 



110 



SYMPATHY 



because he is less than a Father, but more. 
What is the word of the most enlarging sci- 
ence? What does Herbert Spencer say? That 
at the end of his philosophizing he finds him- 
self in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal 
Energy, by whom all things are created and 
sustained — that Infinite and Eternal Energy 
under whose impulses life has been taking on 
higher and higher forms through the ages; that 
Infinite and Eternal Energy under whose im- 
pulses humanity has arisen out of the barbar- 
ism of the tooth and claw into a goodly meas- 
ure of fraternal love and fellowship; that In- 
finite and Eternal Energy which I would still 
name with the old, the everlasting Name. 

In our daily struggle toward a better life, 
let us nerve our hearts and strengthen our 
hands with the assurance that thus we are 
putting ourselves into sympathy with the best 
that is in our fellowmen. Let us nerve our 
hearts and strengthen our hands still more 
with the assurance that thus we are putting 
ourselves into sympathy with God. 



WHICH IS CATCHING, HEALTH OR 
DISEASE? 



In Fitzgerald's translation of that wonder- 
ful Persian poet Omar Khayyam, we read: 

"Ah lcve, could you and I with Him conspire 
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, 

Would we not shatter it to bits, and then 

Remould it nearer to the heart's desire!" 

It has been said to be Colonel Ingersoll's 
expressed opinion that if he had had the re- 
sponsibility of the creation of the universe on 
his shoulders, he would have made health 
catching instead of disease. Which is catch- 
ing, health or disease? 

I have thought there was a lesson for us to 
be drawn from the bacillus. Perhaps the devel- 
opment of the germ theory of disease is one 
of the greatest triumphs of medical science 
during the century. While much remains to 

be learned, it seems pretty well established 
111 



112 



WHICH IS CATCHING, 



that those diseases which we call infectious, 
or contagious, or in the common phrase, "catch- 
ing," such as cholera, diphtheria, small pox, 
scarlet fever, and so on, are due to minute 
organisms, little animals and vegetables which 
multiply in the diseased tissue and then go 
forth to seek other victims, to desolate other 
homes. I brush against my stricken neighbor 
and one of these vigilant germs, some little 
microbe or bacterium or bacillus, as we call 
them, avails itself of my carelessness to take 
up its abode with me, and I too fall before 
the plague. Or perhaps the cup of water 
which I drink, to my unaided vision clear and 
pure and life giving, may contain an army of 
these little invaders bent on destruction. Or 
they may even take the wings of the wind until 
the very air which I breathe is loaded with 
death. 

Loaded with death? Nay, loaded with life. 
It is a living thing that I catch from the 
clothing of my plague-stricken neighbor. It 
is living things peopling the water I drink and 



HEALTH OR DISEASE? 



113 



the air I breathe, that bring me burdens of 
fever and pain. It is not death but life that 
palpitates in the world all about us; not death 
but life that stalks from house to house when 
the dread diphtheria slays our first-born; not 
death but life that sometimes runs from sea 
to sea and leaves a whole nation in sackcloth 
and tears. And so you see that even in this 
world which not we made, but God, it is not 
disease but health that is catching after all. 
It is the very excess, the very superabundance 
of health, health in the microscopic world, 
preying upon health in the world of humanity, 
health in the microbe wrestling with health in 
the man, it is, I say, this very superabundance, 
this very excess of health and strength and vig- 
or in the earth, in the water, in the air, that 
peoples our sick-rooms and fills our graves. 

"Life," it has been said, "evermore is fed 
by death." We may reverse it. "Death evermore 
is fed by life." Death has no power of its own 
to breed. Death is always sterile. It is life 
alone that can propagate itself. 



114 



WHICH IS CATCHING, 



But what of all this? Theorize as you will, 
disease is a fact, and a painful fact. Explain 
as you may, death comes and my fireside is 
darkened. Philosophize bravely; but mean- 
while my child sleeps beneath the myrtle leaves 
and my heart is filled with an unanswered 
longing. What is it but a play on words to 
insist that there was no struggle of life with 
death, but a struggle of life with life, the life 
of my boy with the life of bacillus, and that 
in this struggle for existence the bacillus tri- 
umphed? It does not dry my tears to know 
that though my dear one perished, some scores 
of bacteria survived. 

My friends, I have no disposition to waste 
your time in playing on words or to insult the 
seriousness of human life by fancilul figures of 
speech. But if I mistake not, this change of 
front in the medical world is but part of a 
larger change in our thought of the universe, 
a change of front which is revolutionizing our 
religion and our life. It is as suggestive of 
this larger movement that I wish to draw a 
lesson from the bacillus this morning. 



HEALTH OR DISEASE? 



115 



The same cablegram which told us that 
Pasteur had finally captured the diphtheria 
germ, told us also that he was busy with the prob- 
lem of cultivating and at the same time atten- 
uating or weakening this germ so as to make 
it possible to inoculate with it as a preventive 
of real diphtheria, just as we now anticipate 
and prevent small-pox by giving the system 
the milder kine-pox instead. The discovery 
that living germs are the cause of contagious 
diseases has led already to the application of 
this method of inoculating with some lighter 
form of the disorder and preventing a more 
serious one, both in the lower animals and in 
man. 

In general the method is to take some of 
the virus or poison, that is, the matter con- 
taining these disease producing germs, and 
put it into an artificially prepared medium, 
perhaps what is called an infusion, /'. e., a 
liquid obtained by boiling some vegetable sub- 
stance in water, in order to breed a new gen- 
eration of germs. Some of the virus from this 



116 



WHICH IS CATCHING, 



infusion is then taken, weakened by being ex- 
posed to the air, and put into another infusion 
to breed again. This process is continued, 
the germs being still farther weakened by the 
successive exposures to the air until some are 
obtained still capable of breeding the disease 
but in so mild a form as to be harmless. This 
mild form of the disease, in some obscure way, 
hardens the system so that it will not take the 
severe form; and as the operation of the inoc- 
ulation is more rapid, it is possible even after 
exposure to the original disease to prevent its 
development by inoculation with some of these 
weakened or attenuated germs. Pasteur's 
success in dealing with hydrophobia in this 
way is well known; and he is now attempting 
to apply the method to diphtheria also. 

Incidentally, then, we may say, the discov- 
ery that it is life, not death, that is the posi- 
tive aggressive force in the universe, the dis» 
covery that after all it is health not disease 
that is really "catching," is enabling us to 
turn aside this flood of life which is palpita- 



HEALTH OR DISEASE? 



117 



ting on every side from harmful into harmless 
channels. "A pin," said the little boy, "is 
good to save your life with, by not swallow- 
ing it." A bacillus is good to save your life 
with by diverting this current of vital energy 
into directions where it will cease to harm 
you. The old notion was that disease was a 
positive force seeking to break down our tis- 
sues, shrivel our veins, and fill our bodies with 
pain. Death was a fleshless skeleton, mowing 
down humanity with his scythe, and greeting 
his green swaths with a ghastly grin. Accord- 
ing to the new conception, disease is but mis- 
directed health; premature death but misdi- 
rected life; and our problem is, so to divert 
these forces with which the whole universe is 
quivering as to convert into life and health 
what are now death and disease. According 
to the old conception disease was a flood de- 
liberately rushing towards your homes, and 
bent on destruction. To resist disease was as 
hopeless a task as permanently to dam the ever 
advancing waters. According to the new con- 



118 



WHICH IS CATCHING, 



ception disease is rather obeying the command- 
ment "Thou shalt seek the sea" — a special 
application by the way, of that large com- 
mandment, "Thou shalt seek the sun." If we 
would not be drowned in the waters, we must 
meet them and turn them away from our 
hearthstones. 

Let us go a step farther. This very flood 
which as it sweeps away our barns and crops 
seems a self-conscious fiend, the very embodi- 
ment of ill-will and malice — this very flood, 
by intelligence and prudence and industry we 
may compel to water our thirsty corn and then 
turn the mill-wheel that grinds our flour; un- 
til what seemed the unconscious fiend, the em- 
bodiment of malice, is transformed into a 
ministering angel offering us her kindly ser- 
vice. So this omnipresent energy which, in 
the form of the diphtheria microbe, or the 
cholera bacillus, breeds pestilence and death, 
becomes in other forms the vehicle of life. 
We all know something of those white cor- 
puscles which are always found in our blood. 



HEALTH OR DISEASE? 



11? 



Perhaps we shall take a more cheerful view of 
the role played by the world of microscopic 
life, if we reflect that there is good reason to 
regard these white corpuscles, these curious 
little colorless disks, as living organisms, am- 
oeba-like animalcules upon whose generosity 
I am in some obscure way depending for every 
moment's breath. Without the activity of 
such tiny germs our own vital processes would 
at once and forever cease. Give it but a fit 
field for its energies and the demoniac bacillus 
becomes divine. 

It is not, however, for the sake of the curi- 
ous speculations respecting physiological facts 
and medical methods that I have chosen the 
subject for this morning. I seek if possible 
some fresh inspiration, some broadened out- 
look as regards the relations of life. The old 
notion of disease was but a type of the old 
notion of the universe. It was evil not good, 
error not truth, the devil not God, that was 
"catching." Just as the apple, loosened from 
the bough, the stone, torn from the cliff, the 



120 



WHICH IS CATCHING, 



arrow, when the impulse of the bow was spent, 
fell to the ground, so the inherent tendency 
of things was downward. The tide was against 
us and could be resisted only by a strength 
supernaturally imparted from without. Left 
to ourselves we did not mount towards the 
clouds; we sank toward the bowels of the 
earth, and that way lay Hell. Seeking to 
cultivate the higher life, we were not striving 
to put ourselves into harmony with the deepest 
currents that flow through the universe, nor 
into-sympathy with the very heart of things; 
for the heart of things was bad, the deepest 
currents of the universe flowed toward sin and 
death. In seeking the higher life we were 
lifting a dead weight. One of the classical 
legends represents Sisyphus as condemned for 
his crimes to spend eternity in rolling a huge 
stone to the top of a hill, only to behold the 
stone plunge back from the summit into the 
plain, necessitating the renewal of his fruitless 
endeavor. So, according to the old thought, 
the natural man, if he sought to reach the 



HEALTH OR DISEASE? 



121 



summit of a better and purer life, was engaged 
in a hopeless struggle with gravity. Vice was 
intrinsically more attractive than virtue, error 
more convincing than truth. The unregenerate 
heart turned with eagerness toward the evil, 
and with indifference or disgust away from the 
good. We were begotten in iniquity and born 
in sin. The very term which we still apply 
to one of the Christian myths, embodies this 
thought, that man is by nature depraved. J esus, 
we say, was "immaculately conceived;" as 
though all other conceptions were stained. 
Death was within; life if attained at all, must 
come from without. My mother brought me 
into the world a child of sin; if I ever become 
a child of righteousness, it must be through 
a second birth. According to the old Greek 
story, when Epimetheus opened the box which 
Pandora had brought him as a wedding present 
from Zeus, a multitude of ills and distempers 
came forth and scattered themselves through- 
out the world, and afflicted mankind; but hap- 
pily Hope remained at the bottom of the box. 



122 



WHICH IS CATCHING, 



So this old doctrine of natural total depravity 
did retain one ray of light. God was some 
day to assert his power; the good some day to 
triumph. But meanwhile evil was dominant 
in the human heart, Satan held the reins, the 
universe was yoked with death — disease alone 
was "catching. " 

This is not all changed ; but, thank Heaven, 
it all is changing. We are learning that it is 
health that is "catching" instead of disease. 
Whatever we may think of Christian science 
as a whole, we are all under obligation to it 
for directing our attention to the contagious- 
ness of health. A healthy mind is a center 
from which health may be radiated toward 
other minds, and through them to the bodies 
also. And this is possible because health 
rather than disease is in harmony with the fun- 
damental tendency of things. I have heard 
that pr^sicians tell us that about ten per cent 
of all the cases of sickness that occur are hope- 
less; in another ten per cent of the result is de- 
termined by the character of the treatment; 



HEALTH OR DISEASE? 



123 



while the remaining eighty per cent will re- 
cover anyway, with or without the doctor's 
help. Freed from opposing and prostrating 
influences, left to itself, given a chance, a 
wound tends to get well, not to get worse. 
The intelligent practicioner seeks not to op- 
pose nature but to aid her. The positive 
forces which prevail in the human system are 
not mortal, they are vital. The vis naturae, 
the power of nature, is not a disease-producing 
power but, as the Latins called it a vis me- 
dicatrix natures, a healing power of nature. 
And this healing power of nature is but one 
expression of that omnipresent Eternal Power 
not ourselves which is ever making for a larger, 
healthier, true life. 

The old belief that the innate drift of things 
is towards the evil, was powerfully strength- 
ened by the analogy of the material world, by 
the fact that physical objects unsupported fall. 
When, however, Columbus found the other 
side of the earth and found that it was not an 
under but another upper side; when Magellan 



124 



WHICH IS CATCHING, 



crowned the achievement by circumnavigating 
the globe, the word "down" ceased to have 
any meaning. There is no "down" in the uni- 
verse. And when you get rid of the word 
"down," you undermine the devil. Nature 
becomes but a constant zenith. 

When Newton drew his marvelously brilliant 
induction from the apple's fall, gravitation 
ceased to be of Satan. It came to be of the 
very substance of God. The apple does not 
fall down towards the earth any more than the 
earth falls down towards the apple. Each 
seeks the other and both together seek the 
sun. Thus the apple's fall becomes a part 
of that universal trend which is ever drawing 
all things towards the great center of heat and 
light and life. A round world has no place 
for hell. For hell is no hell when it ceases 
to be a bottomless pit. Hell is no hell when 
if you keep on plunging down into its lowest 
depths it finally leads you out again into the 
broad sunlight of God. At worst, such a hell is 
but an incident in the journey heavenward. 



HEALTH OR DISEASE? 



125 



Let us not, ostrich-like, thrust our heads in 
the sand that we may not see the coming en- 
emy. Let us not ignore unwelcome facts and 
seek, by incessantly denying their existence, 
to addle our brains into the belief that they 
do not exist. Error is a fact. Evil is a fact. 
Disease is a fact, a hard and undeniable fact. 
But our courage in the presence of these facts 
will be very greatly influenced by our convic- 
tions as to their fundamental character. The 
view for which I plead this morning, a view 
which seems to me abundantly confirmed, is, 
that not error and vice and disease, but truth 
and virtue and health are the positive forces 
which determine the course of the world's 
destiny. Error, powerless in itself, becomes 
powerful only through the nucleus of truth 
which it contains. Vice, intrinsically repul- 
sive and weak, becomes attractive and strong by 
calling into activity some impulses which in 
themselves are wholesome and, when properly 
supplemented and balanced by other whole- 
some influences, minster to the highest good. 



126 



WHICH IS CATCHING, 



It is not the disease, but the life of the bacil- 
lus, that is "catching." In a word the universe 
is palpitating, not with death, but with life. 
It is the superabundance of life that fills the 
fields and the forests with a daily struggle for 
existence. It is the superabundance of life 
that fills human society with that fierce com- 
petition which to the sympathetic eye is begin- 
ning to seem so pitiless. And it is not the 
existence but the misdirection of these life 
forces that brings death. Disease is but mis- 
directed health; evil but misdirected good; 
the devil but men's ignorant name for miscon- 
ceived deity. 

And now, while it is the nucleus of truth 
and virtue and health that makes error and 
vice and disease contagious, let it be said 
that there is nothing so contagious as pure 
health, pure virtue, pure truth. Jesus is much 
more "catching" than Judas. What, in our 
western civilization, for the last eighteen hun- 
dred years, has spread like the Christ? Says 
Emerson in that wonderful Divinity School 



HEALTH OR DISEASE? 



121 



Address, "A great and rich soul like his, fall- 
ing among the simple, does so preponderate 
that, as his did, it names the world." Cold 
is but negative. You cannot radiate it. It is 
heat that is positive and can pierce the thick- 
est ice. Did any man ever succeed in piling 
up enough darkness to extinguish even a tal- 
low candle? Give them but a chance, and 
the rays of the sun can penetrate the deepest 
gloom. 

In his picture called "The Holy Night," Cor- 
regio represents the infant Jesus as radiating 
light all about him and illuminating the whole 
scene by his presence. So from every pure 
and wholesome and truthful soul stream forth 
truth and health and purity with a divine in- 
fectiousness. 

Do not misunderstand me. I am not saying 
that heaven can be won without a struggle, 
nor that there are no tendencies to be resisted 
in human life. I am not disparaging "the new 
birth." Calthrop, of Syracuse, once said in 
my hearing in his terse and happy manner, 



128 



WHICH IS CATCHING, 



that, as nearly as he could calculate, every 
one of us needed to be born again just ten mil- 
lion times. Let me have all the regeneration 
possible, but not at the price of insulting gen- 
eration. Let me get a fresh start toward 
Heaven as often as I can, but not because the 
start that my mother gave me was toward hell. 
I must often resist sinful and unholy tenden- 
cies in my own soul and in society; but my 
impulse to resist those tendencies is but part 
of that still deeper tendency that makes for 
righteousness. We must often struggle against 
evil, though theoretically, as I maintain, evil 
is but misdirected good. But in this struggle 
against evil, I would that we might not dis- 
hearten ourselves with the thought that we are 
engaged in a forlorn hope, that we are op- 
posing the most inherent trend of things. I 
would rather that we might inspire ourselves 
with the assurance that though the superficial 
eddies may be, just now, setting in the other 
direction, the underlying tides are with us. 
Mightier are they that are for us than they 



HEALTH OR DISEASE? 



129 



that are against us. Satanic as the outlook 
sometimes seems, the one all-embracing and 
eternal fact is God. 

Under the shadow of the old thought of life 
I stood in my door-way, and peering out into 
the darkness, got glimpses of demons staring 
at me with their malignant eyes and remind- 
ing me of the moral disease which had perme- 
ated the world past all hope of recovery, against 
the contagion of which I was powerless to pro- 
tect myself. Under the illumination of the 
new thought of life I stand in my door-way 
and fearlessly look out into the darkness. I 
do, at times, find ugly faces; but as I gaze, I 
find within those distorted features the possi- 
bilities of that beauty out of which angels take 
shape, that beauty which is the most persist- 
ently contagious thing in the universe. Then 
I venture forth to do my little part in the 
world with no concern as to the outcome; for 
"Fierce though the fiends may fight. 

And long though the angels hide, 
I know that truth and right 

Have the universe on their side." 



DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE; A 
STUDY IN DUALISM. 



"God created man in his own image, in the image of God 
created he him." Genesis i. 27. 

Thus runs the old myth in which the primi- 
tive fancy of some Hebrew poet told the story 
of humanity's birth. The passage accords with 
the early thought of Israel respecting man. 
Human nature was of unmixed origin; man 
was not Janus-faced, half devilish, half divine, 
but created solely in the image of his God. 
The notion that there are in the universe two 
opposing powers contending with each other 
for the mastery, good and evil, light and dark- 
ness, was foreign to the ideas of the ancient 
Jews. It was probably imported into Palestine 
from Persia, where these two opposing powers 

were called Ormuzd and Ahriman. Zoroas- 
130 



A STUDY IN DUALISM 



131 



trianism, the religion of the Persians, was the 
most distinctly dualistic religion of antiquity. 
After the close contact of Hebrew with Per- 
sian thought during and subsequent to the 
Babylonish captivity, dualism made its appear- 
ance among the Jews. 

In the thought of ancient Israel there was 
no devil. The statement may seem at first a 
little startling, so accustomed are we to read- 
ing later ideas into ancient texts. We fancy 
his Satanic majesty stalking through the gar- 
den of Eden, and plotting against Jehovah, as 
the great rival of God for the government of 
the world. It was the serpent that tempted 
Eve to eat the apple. Only that and nothing 
more. 

The Satan of Job was a very different per- 
sonage from the Satan of Jesus. The Satan of 
Job was one of the servants of Jehovah. Some 
one has happily described Job's Satan as a 
sort of prosecuting attorney, whose special 
duty it was to arraign men for their wicked- 
ness before the bar of the Most High. Satan 



132 



DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 



in the time of Jesus had become identified 
with the Ahriman of Persian dualism, the 
prince of darkness, the great antagonist of God 
who was waging a pretty evenly balanced con- 
test with him for the sovereignty of the uni- 
verse. 

Do not understand me as saying that the 
ancient Hebrews denied or ignored the exist- 
ence of evil. That was too obvious a fact to 
be overlooked. But they asserted the single 
origin of man. Good and evil alike came from 
the hand of Jehovah; over them both he held 
undivided sway. "I form the light and create 
darkness," wrote the so-called second Isaiah 
who prophesied during the captivity at Baby- 
lon. "I make peace and create evil, I, Jehovah, 
do all these things." 

As the Hebrew ideal of God advanced, as 
Jehovah came more and more to be regarded 
as the soul and source of goodness and purity 
and truth, this explanation of the origin of 
evil became increasingly unsatisfactory. It 
seemed incredible that a good God should 



A STUDY IN DUALISM 



]33 



have deliberately created evil. Hebrew thought 
thus turned with approval to Persian dualism, 
the belief, namely, that good and evil came 
from two opposite and contending powers, 
Ormuzd and Ahriman. From that time to the 
present, this Persian idea has played a prom 
inent part in the development of Jewish and 
Christian thought. God and the devil have 
divided between them the government of the 
universe. 

Probably the most popular and widely known 
restatement of this doctrine which has appeared 
in our generation is to be found in Dr. Jekyll 
and Mr. Hyde. The strange story made Robert 
Louis Stevenson famous in a day. 

The tale is so familiar that it hardly needs 
retelling. Dr. Jekyll is a physician who stands 
well in the community and as a whole lives 
on a relatively high plan, a reputable worthy 
citizen. Like most men however, he finds 
within himself certain lower instincts which it 
is pleasant to gratify, but the pleasure is marred 
by the reproaches of his higher nature. If 



134 



DR. JEKYLL ASD MR. HYDE 



now. as he reasons, he could devise some way 
of getting rid temporarily of this higher na- 
ture, then it would be possible to revel for a 
time in sensuality without the drawback of 
being rebuked for so doing by his conscience. 
It would be possible to have an unadulterated 
spree of sin, and then when he chose transmit 
himself back into Dr. Jekyll again, the respected 
citizen and thoroughly moral man. 

Indeed, a still more desirable thing would 
be to resolve himself into two men diametric- 
ally opposed to each other, the one wholly 
good the other wholly bad. and then alternate 
at will between them Thus part of the time 
he could enjoy being purely good, without the 
annoyance of constant temptations toward the 
evil: at other times he could enjoy being 
purely bad. without the annoyance of constant 
reproaches from his conscience. As it is he 
finds himself to consist of two men in one. an 
angel of light and an angel of darkness, either 
of which by itself can furnish a large measure 
of enjoyment; but when bound together as 



A STUDY IN DUALISM 



135 



Dr. Jekyll, they become very uncomfortable 
companions. 

The complete separation into two men, the 
one purely good the other purely bad, he never 
succeeds in making, and unfortunately he first 
experiments not with divesting himself of his 
lower nature and becoming purely good, but 
with divesting himself of his higher nature 
and becoming purely bad. After much labor 
and search he succeeds in compounding a drug 
which effects this marvelous metamorphosis. 
It transforms him from the benevolent and 
decorous Dr. Jekyll into the malignant and 
repulsive Edward Hyde, distorted in feature 
and shrunken in form, the incarnation of 
wickedness. When satisfied with his debauch, 
he takes another draught of drugs and becomes 
Dr. Jekyll once more. 

In one of these carousals, when Dr. Jekyll 
disappeared for the time from public view and 
the mysterious Mr. Hyde roamed about, he 
meets a little girl on the street and out of 
pure "malice knocks her to the ground and 



136 



DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 



tramples on her body in a riot of cruelty. As, 
however, she escapes permanent injury he is 
able to avoid further punishment by paying 
over to her family a large sum of money. On 
another occasion he meets a prominent citizen 
and, without any provocation worth mention- 
ing, in a paroxysm of harshness he beats out 
his life. Henceforth it is of course unsafe 
to appear on the street as Mr. Hyde. More- 
over this terrible enormity to which the indul- 
gence of his lower propensities has carried 
him, arouses him to a sense of his peril. He 
resolves to abandon his madness and keep 
himself hereafter the uncomfortably dual but 
still safe and respectable Dr. Jekyll. 

Meantime, however, an awful deterioration 
has been worked in his character. These fre- 
quent sprees have gradually weakened his 
higher nature and strengthened his lower. At 
the start it was with difficulty that the medi- 
cine transformed him into Mr. Hyde; now it 
is with difficulty that it transforms him back 
into Dr. Jekyll. Moreover, often without the 



A STUDY IN DUALISM 



137 



use of the drug, when he does not intend it, 
he finds himself slipping back into the lower 
character. He goes to bed Dr. Jekyll and 
wakes up Mr. Hyde. At odd and unexpected 
times, in a moment of revery, or whenever his 
conscience relaxes its grip upon his soul, the 
hideous metamorphosis is repeatedly occurring. 

He is compelled to keep out of sight, to shut 
himself up in his laboratory, to devote all his 
time and energies to the task of keeping him- 
self out of the bottomless pit. At last, to fill 
to the brim the cup of his misery, the potion 
entirely loses its power. He searches in vain 
for the peculiar method which he had originally 
employed in compounding his wonderful drink 
and is compelled to end his days with his own 
hand , the shriveled, loathsome, devilish 
Edward Hyde. 

Looking now at Mr. Stevenson's weird but 
powerful story, perhaps the most obvious re- 
flection which it provokes is the peril of play- 
ing with an unworthy passion. "They that sow 
the wind shall reap the whirlwind." The va- 



138 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 

rious faculties of our nature, low and high 
alike, grow and strengthen with exercise. If 
we would develop the higher we must reso- 
lutely turn away from the lower. If we would 
have a crop of wheat, we must be careful not 
to cultivate the tares. What we call the evil 
does to at least a superficial seeming, appear 
to propagate itself like the good. 

"Because a man sins once, the sin 

Cleaves to him in necessity to sin." 

Over and over again in human history have 
men "paid the price of lies, by being con- 
strained to lie on still." 

Let nothing that I ma) 7 say to-da3 7 weaken 
the force with which the strange story of Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has impressed on any 
mind the danger of yielding for a moment to 
a low propensity, a base desire. But it is not 
as a fresh statement of this commonplace, 
though momentous, lesson that Robert Louis 
Stevenson's grim conceit so speedily made for 
itself a place on the shelf of literature. It 
won this triumph rather as a contribution to 



A STUDY IN DUALISM 



139 



the philosophy of human nature, a restatement 
of the dualistic theory of the human heart. 
As such I wish to enter my humble protest 
against it in the name alike of God and of man. 

The story goes that a certain disciple of 
Tolstoi, the Russian novelist, or as he would 
prefer to be known, the reviver of the pure 
gospel of Jesus, being asked how he fared in 
loving people indiscriminately as his Master 
enjoined, replied, with some hesitation, "There 
are a great many, yes, a very great many ex- 
tremely unpleasant people in the world." I 
have had the experience of Tolstoi's disciple; 
and I have no doubt that my acquaintances 
have had the same experience in their rela- 
tions with me. Unpleasant traits are a part 
of our common inheritance But Edward 
Hyde, the incarnation of malignity, the lover 
of evil for its own sake, the man that revelled 
in sin purely and simply for its intrinsic delight- 
fulness is, I think, a monstrosity that knows 
no counterpart in actual life. Edward Hyde, 
just for the fun of it trampling on an unoffend- 



140 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 



ing child, Edward Hyde, just for the fun of 
it beating to death a helpless old man, is, I 
think, a blasphemous delineation not to be 
justified from an}* human experience. 

I have never felt much admiration for the 
ostrich that felt herself safe from her pursuers 
because she had plunged her head in the sand 
and so escaped seeing them. I have no admi- 
ration for that easy going optimism which gets 
over uncomfortable facts by closing one's eyes 
to them. Let us look human nature squarely 
in the face, with all its imperfections as they 
display themselves either to our own con- 
sciences or in the world around, and inquire 
whether the materials for an Edward Hyde 
are, as Stevenson's story suggests, to be found 
in every soul; whether there is in fact a du- 
alism which thus cuts us in two, half devilish, 
half divine ; whether in our hearts there are im- 
pulses which go out spontaneously, even as 
the sparks fly upward, toward that which is 
intrinsically vile. 

Men used to think of heat and cold as two 



A STUDY IN DUALISM 



141 



positive forces contending with eacn other for 
the mastery. Modern science has dethroned 
this physical dualism. There is no such pos- 
itive force as cold. The term but stands for 
a negative condition, the absence of heat. 
When during the wintry months we shiver 
with the blasts from the north, though no sci- 
entific views may keep our ears from freezing, 
I think we shall stand the hardship in some- 
what better mood for the assurance that we are 
not being assailed by demons of the frost, ea- 
ger in their malicious glee to pinch our fingers 
and curdle our blood. 

Men used to think of light and darkness as 
two positive forces contending with each other 
for the mastery. But this bit of dualism too 
has been banished by modern science. There 
is no such positive thing as darkness. The 
term but stands for a negative condition, the 
absence of light. This knowledge will not 
enable us to find our way through the forest 
in a moonless midnight ; but it may abate 
something of the old paralyzing terror that re- 



142 



DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 



suited from the fancied presence of those ma- 
lignant powers of the air which found in the 
darkness their substance as well as their 
dwelling place. 

Men used to think that this planet of ours 
was a puppet in the hands of two positive 
forces, a centripetal and a centrifugal, one 
seeking to draw it towards the central sun. the 
other seeking to tear it away from that source 
of bright heat and plunge it into the cold dark- 
ness of remotest space. This bit of dualism 
like the others, modern science has dispelled. 
There is no such thing as centrifugal force. 
The one positive power which, combined with 
its own inertia, keeps our earth circling in its 
orderly eclipse, is the power that bids it seek 
the sun — a sort of type, unless my fancy de- 
ludes me, of that spiritual gravity which is ever 
drawing the human soul toward God. 

Analogy is not argument, though often mis- 
taken for it. Let us not be misled into the 
common error of drawing conclusions from 
analogies. Yet the changes in scientific thought 



A STUDY IN DUALISM 



143 



to which I have referred, do seem properly 
suggestive of the inquiry whether the wider 
knowledge which has banished dualism from 
the realm of physics will not also banish it 
from the realm of faith. - 

In the world about us there is an abundance 
of what we call evil, those undeveloped and 
misdirected energies which bear fruit in sin 
and crime. Let us not ignore it. Let us not, 
ostrich-like, thrust our heads into the sand in 
order to escape seeing an unwelcome fact. But 
when we come to examine that fact, do we 
find two positive forces, two semi-infinite 
powers clashing in deadly encounter, light and 
darkness, heat and cold, the centripetal and 
centrifugal attractions? Or do we not find 
one infinite potentiality of good, slowly but 
steadily working itself out into an actuality of 
virtue and truth? Do we not find heat slowly 
melting the passive icebergs of human selfish- 
ness, light slowly penetrating the stolid dark- 
ness of man's primeval ignorance, the centri- 
petal gravity slowly and sometimes in devious 



144 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 



paths drawing the human soul toward the di- 
vine? 

Theodore Parker used to say that evil in hu- 
man history is but the blots and scrawls which 
we leave on God's great writing-book as in 
our awkwardness and immaturity we strive to 
imitate the copy his hand has set. Which is 
the true philosophy of life, that of Parker or 
Stevenson? Which is the true type of human 
misdoing, the erring man of the Boston preach- 
er's simile or Edward Hyde? 

Men do sometimes strike down helpless chil- 
dren with a horrible brutality. Is it because 
of an intrinsic satisfaction in being cruel? I 
do not succeed in finding the germ of that in- 
stinct in my own soul, nor in yours. Yet 
probably none of us can lay claim to having 
always been kind and just, even to those to 
whom we gave being, whom we love as our 
very lives. Recall your moment of petulance, 
analyze the motives that led to the unkind 
act, and do you not find that you were tem- 
porarily yielding to certain lower impulses 



A STUDY IN DUALISM 



145 



proper enough in themselves but at that time 
unbalanced by higher and more self-denying 
ones: lower impulses which if suppplemented 
by those higher ones would have rounded out 
your conduct into the completeness of unselfish 
virtue? 

Men do sometimes beat out the lives of their 
fellow men for altogether insufficient provo- 
cation, or it may be none at all. Superficially 
the murder which Edward Hyde perpetrated 
on the street at midnight does seem drawn to 
the life. But do men commit these deeds 
from the inherent deliciousness of sinning? I 
doubt our finding on any scaffold in human 
history a murderer with a moral nature so per- 
verse. Has not the assassin's arm been di- 
rected by love of gain, or worldly ambition, or 
resentment toward real or fancied injustice — 
qualities not positively bad, nay, rather, pos- 
itively good, indeed essential to complete man- 
hood? But these need the balance and sup- 
plement of higher qualities to round out that 
manhood to its virtuous completeness. 



146 



DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 



What seems to me to be the true, and des- 
tined to be the triumphant, tendency of phi- 
losophy, unites with the analogies of physical 
science and with the unperverted instincts of 
the soul, to condemn this dualism which has 
long and largely prevailed in human thought. 
We are coming to find at the center of things 
not Ormuzd and Ahriman in deadly encounter, 
but "The Power not ourselves that makes for 
righteousness." We are learning to find in hu- 
man nature not Edward Hyde and his unnamed 
rival that made up the rest of the dual Dr. 
Jekyll, but potentially, in the language of my 
text, the image of God. We are beginning to 
recognize evil as but unbalanced or undevel- 
oped or misdirected good. "All men," says 
Stevenson, "are possible Hydes. " Nay I reply, 
with Mrs, Browning, "All men are possible 
heroes." And what j^ou and I need ourselves, 
what we should seek to secure with our fellows, 
is such a harmonious development of the di- 
vine possibilities in the human soul as shall 
make us all heroic. 



A STUDY IN DUALISM 



147 



And is this a mere matter of theory, inter- 
esting only as speculation? If I mistake not 
it is preeminently practical. It lays hold of 
the very substance of living Dualism, this 
doctrine which I am attempting to-day in my 
humble fashion to impeach, has made man- 
kind afraid of the devil in the dark. Dualism 
has terrified man with the undeveloped and 
mysterious powers which he has gotten a 
glimpse of in his own nature ; and so he has 
turned hermit, deliberately stifled his God- 
given capacities as devil-born, and sought in 
dreamy meditation to escape Gehenna by 
escaping from himself. Dualism has frightened 
man with whatever, for the time, baffled his 
inquiry or exceeded his knowledge, as due to 
Satanic inspiration or control ; and so in alarm 
men have hung their fellows for witchcraft, or 
burned them for heresy. Dualism is making 
us afraid to-day to launch out on the sea of 
untrammeled thinking lest on that unsailed 
ocean Ormuzd prove less powerful than Ahri- 
man, and so we wreck our souls on the rocks 



148 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 



of error. We shrink from looking or listen- 
ing lest our old faith be shaken by some Sa- 
tanic sight or sound. Thus we lose that su- 
preme joy of intellectual experience, unre- 
served and fearless surrender to a clear con- 
viction of truth. 

We need to think with caution, to act with 
circumspection, to exercise vigilance in stim- 
ulating the higher traits of the moral nature and 
keeping in strict subjection those impulses 
which are gross or low But through it all 
I think we need to reverence ourselves, as con- 
taining within us the divine possibilities of a 
pure and noble character. We need to rein- 
force our energies with a faith in one supreme 
God who holds undivided sway throughout the 
realm of nature and of man. 

"If God did not exist," said Voltaire, "it 
would be necessary to invent him." "If God 
existed," replied one who professed himself 
an atheist, "it would be necessary to abolish 
him." Dualism, that phase of dualism which 
fears to give up the terror of the cloven foot, 



A STUDY IN DUALISM 



149 



has paraphrased Voltaire and declared, "If 
the devil did not exist, it would be necessary 
to invent him. " Let us paraphrase the thought 
and say, "If the devil did exist, it would be 
necessary to abolish him," This is the faith 
that seems to me true because wholesome, and 
wholesome because true, the faith that 
"teaches me to deem 
More sacredly of every human heart 
Since each reflects in joy its scanty gleam 
Of heaven, and could some wondrous secret show 
Did we but pay the love we owe, 
And with a child's undoubting wisdom look 
On all these living pages of God's book." 



FAITH. 



Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the proving of 
things not seen, Heb. xi. i. 

This text is uttered with noteworthy preci- 
sion of both thought and expression by the 
unknown author of the epistle to the Hebrews. 

Faith is a much abused word, a word of 
many meanings. It is derived from the same 
root as fidelity, and like fidelity may mean 
loyalty, a strict adherence to duty and fulfill- 
ment of one's promises. Thus we speak of a 
man's breaking his faith when he traitorously 
deserts a person or a cause when he has prom- 
ised to serve, just as we speak of his infidelity 
when he violates his vows. 

Again a man's faith may mean his creed, 

his religious belief, his convictions about 

moral and spiritual things Thus we speak 

of the Christian faith, the Jewish faith, the 

Mohammedan faith, our Unitarian faith. 

150 



FAITH 



151 



Out of this meaning of faith, namely, a par- 
ticular belief, there has arisen another and 
curious use of the word "infidelity." A sect, 
confident that its own faith is the true faith, 
comes to think of it as the only faith, and so 
calls a man of any other faith a faithless man, 
an infidel. From the point of view of the 
Mohammedans, the Christian faith is faithless- 
ness, the Christian is an infidel. In the minds 
of many orthodox Christians if a man be- 
lieve there have been and are other Sons of 
God than Jesus of Nazareth, other expressions 
of God's word than the Bible, this man's faith 
is faithless, he is an infidel. Indeed, in the 
mouth of many a most excellent but excessive- 
ly self-confident believer, the term infidel comes 
pretty near applying to everybody except him- 
self. The story goes that a friend in a con- 
versation with a zealous Scotch covenanter, 
remonstrated with him for the narrowness of 
his fellowship. "According to your view," 
said the friend, "nobody is likely to be saved 
except yourself and your brother Alexander." 



152 



FAITH 



"Aweel," was the Scotchman's reply, "aweel, 
I am na' sae sure aboot Sandy." Thus infi- 
delity, which we found a moment ago to mean 
disloyalty, the breaking of one's word, comes 
often to mean in a man's mouth the believing 
of some faith other than the one which he be- 
lieves. This singular association of a depart- 
ure from the prevalent belief with immorality 
is suggested also by the et3 T mology of another 
common word. "Miscreant" has according to its 
derivation exactly the same meaning as infidel. 
A miscreant is a mis-creed-ant. a misbeliever. 
Again there is a third use of the word faith 
which comes nearer its original meaning, and 
nearer the meaning in which I wish it to stand 
in my talk this morning. Faith may mean 
confidence in another which leads me to believe 
on his authority what I do not myself directly 
know. 

I know that two plus two are four. I caii see 
that truth myself, and so my knowledge c:oes not 
depend on any other man's authority. I know 
that the square on the hypothenvse oi a right- 



FAITH 



153 



angled triangle is equal to the sum of the 
squares on the other two sides. I have proved 
that statement myself, and so my knowledge 
does not depend on any other man's authority. 
Some of you know, but I do not, that water 
consists of two parts of hydrogen and one part 
of oxygen. I have never proved that. I be- 
lieve it however, because of my faith in the 
capacity and truthfulness of the scientists who 
tell me so. Some of you know, but I do not, 
that there is such a city as Washington. I be- 
lieve that there is, however, because oZ my 
faith in the sanity and truthfulness of the trav- 
elers who tell me that they have seen it. No 
one of us knows that Julius Caesar ever lived. 
We all believe it, however, because of our faith 
in a line of witnesses ending in some man or 
men who actually did see and know him. 
This is the faith of which our text speaks, "the 
proving of things not seen." Not however 
that this is a faith independent of knowledge. 
It is a faith based on some knowledge of the 
person in whom the faith is placed. I telieve 



154 



FAITH 



that water consists of two parts of hydrogen 
and one part of oxygen, I believe that there is 
such a city as Washington, and that there was 
such a man as Julius Caesar, because my knowl- 
edge of the men and the records that tell me 
so, is such as to give me faith in their truth- 
fulness, their credibility. 

Loosely connected with this meaning of the 
word faith is an entirely illegitimate use of 
the word which is however so common as to 
demand our notice. I, for instance, question 
the doctrine of the Trinity. I say that I do not 
understand how it can be, as some of the later 
creeds tell us, that "there are three persons in 
the God-head : the Father, the Son, and the 
Holy Ghost, and these three are one God. ,; 
"You must not try to understand it," I am 
told. "You must take it on faith." Take it 
on faith? Faith in whom or in what? Faith 
is not in itself a faculty through which I can 
believe. To talk about accepting a truth 
through faith pure and simple, is as absurd as 
to talk about accepting a truth through my 



FAITH 



155 



foot. Faith pure and simple is not a channel 
through which a real belief can come to any- 
body. It is entirely unnecessary to tell a man 
that he should not believe without some evi- 
dence. You might as well tell him not to fall 
up. He cannot believe without evidence. He 
may pretend that he believes; he may think 
he believes; he may believe he believes; but 
he has no real belief. It is only the vague 
and phantasmagoric semblance of a belief. Ask 
such a person to listen to a sermon or read a 
book on the other side, and very likely he will 
tell you he does not wish to read or listen, he 
is satisfied with his present belief and does 
not care to run the risk of disturbing it. But 
in so far as I have any fear that my belief may 
be disturbed, to that extent I cease to have any 
real belief. I am merely deluding myself when 
I say I believe. Let us supppose I have a great 
admiration for some military commander, but 
I shrink from reading any unfavorable criti- 
cisms of him, lest I run across some facts to 
his discredit. Now in so far as I have any 



156 FAITH 

suspicion that if I read I may find such facts, 
to that extent my faith in him as the proper 
object of my unreserved admiration is a con- 
scious or unconscious sham. So, in so far as 
I have any apprehension that further investi- 
gation may unsettle some cherished belief, to 
that extent I must have some uncertainty about 
the correctness of that belief; to that extent I 
have no real belief. 

It has been counselled, "Let us maintain be- 
fore we have proved ; this seeming paradox is 
the secret of happiness." Maintaining before 
we have proved may be the secret of some 
men's superficial happiness ; it never can be the 
secret of a healthy intellectual and moral life. 

Faith pure and simple may make us credu- 
lous; it cannot make us really believing. Must 
I take the doctrine of the Trinity on faith? 
Here on the one hand is an apparently intelli- 
gent man who affirms it, but unfortunately there 
on the other hand is an apparently intelligent 
man who denies it. In which of the two shall 
I put my faith? If instead of tackling this 



FAITH 



157 



doctrine directly with my own reason and form- 
ing my own opinion about it, I prefer, as we 
say, "not to use my reason" but to take some- 
body's opinion, yet I am at once compelled to 
use my reason in deciding which of these two 
men is the more trustworthy, which, therefore, 
of these two contradictory opinions I would 
better take". So I say faith never can be inde- 
pendent of reason. Indirectly, if not directly, 
it must be founded on reason. In the words 
of the noble and lovely Quakeress, the late 
Lucretia Mott, we must have "truth for au- 
thority, not authority for truth." 

I do indeed believe many things that I can- 
not prove ; many things that I have not proved ; 
many things that I do not know; but I believe 
them because the men or the records in whom 
I put my faith, rightly or wrongly, to my rea- 
son seem faithful. 

The faith then, for which I wish to plead 
this morning is not a faith opposed to reason, 
but a faith based on reason ; not a faith inde- 
pendent of knowledge but a faith grounded in 



158 



FAITH 



knowledge; it is the faith of which the apostle 
speaks, "the assurance of things hoped for, the 
proving of things not seen." Faith in this 
sense is essential to the highest character, the 
largest success. 

Let us come closer to the subject. In what 
do we need to repose this faith? 

First, we need faith in ourselves. My past 
is the realm of fact; my future is the realm of 
faith. I know what I have done already. It 
remains to be seen what I can do hereafter. \ 
can do very little hereafter unless, based upon 
what I have done, I have a faith in my power 
to do again, a faith grounded in knowledge but 
running beyond the limits of knowledge; a 
faith which is the "assurance of things hoped 
for, the proving of things not seen." I do not 
positively know that I can ever lift my arm 
again, but I believe that I can because I have 
already lifted it so many times, and faith in 
my ability gives me power to strike, while 
without that faith my arm would be limp and 
weak. Indeed my success is often limited not 



FAITH 



159 



so much by my capacity as by my lack of faith 
in my capacity. History is full of men of fine 
physical and intellectual powers who have been 
ciphers in the world because of their self-dis- 
trust. While engaged in Normal School work 
I used to be fond of telling teachers to get 
ability if they could, but whether in that they 
succeeded or not, by all means to get self-con- 
fidence. A large amount of such confidence 
with a small amount of ability is indeed a re- 
pulsive spectacle; but a large amount of ability 
with a small amount of self-trust, is incom- 
petence; and for the whole self-sufficiency is 
better than inefficiency. 

"Luck flies from the cold one, 

But leaps to the bold one half way." 

It is the immense influence upon physical 
health and strength of serene confidence in 
oneself that is, if I mistake not, the great truth 
at the foundation of so-called Christian Sci- 
ence. Let us then acquire a large measure of 
faith in ourselves and having acquired it, con- 
secrate it to the highest uses of it. 



160 



FAITH 



"When duty whispers low, 'thou must', 
The youth replies, " I can.' " 

Again, we need faith in humanity. Not in- 
deed a faith without knowledge, but a faith 
grounded in knowledge to reach out beyond 
the limits of knowledge. Frequently in their 
eagerness to efface vices, to redress wrongs, 
the best and most noble souls so concentrate 
their attention on the wrongs and the vices as 
to get a very distorted picture of human char- 
acter and society. 

"There are nettles everywhere, 

But smooth green grasses are more common still, 
The blue of Heaven is larger than the cloud," 

This faith in humanity seems specially need- 
ed at the present crisis in our industrial life. 
The anarchist, the socialist, the communist, 
the nationalist, the labor-reformer, are shout- 
ing that our present industrial fabric is rotten 
and must fall; that our system of private prop- 
erty must go, and with it of course interest 
taken for the use of capital, and rent for the 
use of property, and wage given for the com- 
pensation of the laborer. I think it quite prob- 



FAITH 



16] 



able that we do stand upon the threshold of 
some important changes in the business world 
and in our industrial life. Such a prospect fills 
many people with dismay. The civilization 
which has been slowly growing through cen- 
turies of struggle seems going to ruin. In such 
a mood we need to refresh our faith with a 
wider view, a larger knowledge. Look at 
Europe in the early centuries of the Christian 
era. Herds of barbarians came pouring down 
from the unlettered north and shattered that 
fabric which the culture of Greece and Rome 
had for centuries been rearing. Yet out of the 
wreck has grown a truer civilization than those 
classic states had known. Imperfect and un- 
lovely as the man of the nineteenth century 
may be, compare him with the uncouth trog- 
lodyte, the rude cave-dweller from which we 
sprang. Then turn to the improvement of our 
modern life, the redressing of wrongs, the 
effacing of vices, the reformation of abuses, 
with renewed faith in the future of humanity. 
"A sower went his way alone 



162 



FAITH 



And I heard him sing and say, 
The noon is bright, but soon the night 

Will come, the grave of the day. 
Then I smiled to hear his woful song, 

And sent these words their way — 
The noon is bright, but the blackest night 

Cradles another day." 

Once more, we need faith in truth. Not a 
faith without knowledge, but a faith grounded 
in knowledge to reach out beyond the limits of 
knowledge. Over and over again have men 
stood aghast in the presence of some new truth 
which threatened with overthrow a fond expec- 
tation, a cherished belief; and over and over 
again, like Jacob after wrestling with his God, 
has that expectation, that belief, risen from 
the overthrow with a fresh blessing for the hu- 
man soul. In his book called "Illustrations of 
Universal Progress" (page 358) Herbert Spen- 
cer makes the following comment on the em- 
inent geologist Hugh Miller: "He considered 
the hypothesis [namely, the doctrine of evo- 
lution] at variance with Christianity, and 
therefore combated with it. He apparently 
overlooked the fact that the doctrines of ge- 



FAITH 



163 



ology in general, as held by himself, had been 
rejected by many on similar grounds ; and that 
he had himself been repeatedly attacked for 
his anti-Christian teachings. He seems not to 
have perceived that just as his antagonists 
were wrong in condemning as irreligious the- 
ories which he saw were not irreligious, so 
might he be wrong in condemning on like 
grounds the theory of evolution. In brief, he 
fell short of that highest faith which knows 
that all truths must harmonize, and which is, 
therefore, content trustfully to follow the evi- 
dence whithersoever it leads." In a lecent 
article on John Weiss (Unitarian Review, May, 
1888, page 419), O. B. Frothingham quotes 
the following noble sentences from that bril- 
liant critic and preacher: "It is a wonder to 
me that scholars and clergymen are so skittish 
about scientific facts." "We need be afraid 
of nothing in heaven or earth whether dreamt 
of or not in our philosophy." And let me 
add a quotation from John Stuart Mill's essay 
on Liberty (page 43): "In the present age — 



164 



FAITH 



which has been described as 'destitute of faith, 
but terrified at skepticism/ — in which people 
feel sure, not so much that their opinions are 
true, as that they should not know what to do 
without them — the claims of an opinion to be 
protected from public attack are rested not so 
much on its truth, as on its importance to so- 
ciety." Our age destitute of faith but afraid 
of skepticism! The characterization is too 
true. But the man or the age that is afraid 
of skepticism is, and must ever be, destitute 
of faith. With the recollection of what truth 
has done for humanity in the past let us rise 
to that faith in the truth which shall make us 
fearless in the presence of ever)' fact. 

And lastly, back of our intellectual selves, 
as the One in whom we live and move and have 
our being, back of humanity as its Eternal 
Source, back of the truth as the enduring real- 
ity which thus finds expression, we need faith 
in God. Not a faith without knowledge, but 
a faith founded in knowledge to reach out be- 
yond the limits of knowledge. 



FAITH 



165 



Probably the most depressing contribution 
that modern science has made to religious 
thought has been the new view of the solar 
system. Beginning in the superheated nebular 
matter which once filled the interplanetary 
spaces during uncounted ages, we have been 
steadily shrinking and growing cold. The 
moon has already passed the habitable period. 
With her burnt out craters like so many dead 
eyes, she vacantly stares at the earth, her 
larger but younger sister, still palpitating with 
life. Still palpitating with life? But only for 
a time. The same fate awaits us too. An un- 
broken desolation will eventually envelop the 
globe. The sun also will at last go out. and 
with it the earth and the moon and all the 
planets and satellites become mere dead balls 
whirling through the lifeless sky. We began 
in steam, we end in ice, and the drama is over. 
Where now is God? But no scientist has told 
us what meantime has become of those rays 
of light and heat which during the ages have 
been leaving the solar system to grow dark and 



166 



FAITH 



cold while they shot forth on their paths 
through limitless space. Trace them to their 
end before you set bounds to the resources of 
the Eternal. Will the sun expire? will the 
earth turn to ice? But heat cannot perish, 
light can never die. Basing our faith on our 
knowledge, basing our expectation of what 
shall be on what has been, and on what is, we 
may confidently affirm that somehow and some- 
where will be conserved those positive forces 
which play about and within us to-day, some- 
how and somewhere will continue to reveal 
itself in undying forms the eternal meaning of 
human life. Let us trust God in the great 
things as in the little, and we are trusting him 
in the little every day. 

"There is no unbelief: 
Whoever plants a leaf beneath the sod, 
And waits to see it push away the clod, 
He trusts in God." 

Faith in oneself, faith in humanity, faith in 
truth, faith in God, let this four-stranded cable 
anchor us to a life of patient, helpful, earnest 
labor, no matter what the temporary discour- 



I . . 

faith 167 



agements or disasters that may befall us. 
"Fools when the roof-tree 
Falls, think it dooms-day: 
Firm stands the sky." 
The story goes that a farmer's boy was 

awakened to see the remarkable displa}^ of 
meteors which occurred in 1866; after gazing 
open-mouthed and in great alarm for some 
minutes he suddenly turned and in a tone of 
comforting joy exclaimed, "Master, don't be 
afraid, the great dipper hangs on yet." So 
when at times the sky seems to be falling, 
the eye of faith pierces through the meteoric 
shower and catches a reassuring glimpse of the » 
abiding heavens beyond. May that eye of faith 
be ours. May it see with ever increasing clear- 
ness. May it stimulate in the midst of dis- 

heartenment and trial. 

' 'Endurance is the crowning quality, 

And patience all the passion of great hearts; 

These are their stay, and when the leaden world 

Sets its hard face against their faithful thought, 

And brute- strength, like a scornful conqueror, 

Clangs his huge mace down in the other scale, 

The inspired soul but flings his patience in, 

And slowly that outweighs the ponderous globe, — 

One faith against a whole earth's unbelief, 

One soul against the flesh of all mankind." 



SHALL WE PREACH THE WHOLE 
TRUTH TO THE PEOPLE? 



Let us take fcr our text two sentences 
from Herbert Spencer: "Not as adven- 
titious (/. e. accidental) will the wise man 
regard the faith which is in him. The highest 
truth he sees he will fearlessly utter ; knowing 
that, let what may come of it, he is thus play- 
• ing his right part in the world — knowing that 
if he can effect the change he aims at — well; 
if not — well also; though not so well." 

It has been maintained that all religions are 
"equally true in the eyes of the people, equally 
false in the eyes of the philosopher, equally 
useful in the eyes of the magistrate." All re- 
ligions false, but all religions useful! That, 
or something like it, is a very common opinion. 
You have heard men say — have you not? — 

"Roman Catholicism is superstition, but you 
168 



SHALL WE PREACH THE WHOLE TRUTH 169 



must not tell the Catholic rabble so. If they 
were made to believe that the Pope of Rome 
had no authority over them they would em- 
brace the very first opportunity to go to the 
devil." But when those believers in the use- 
fulness of a false religion talk about going to 
the devil, they are of course only using a figure 
of speech, for they add, again, under their 
breath, "There is not any devil. But do not 
publish his obituary. Let it be understood 
that he is still on the police force, even though 
men may no longer see him at the street cor- 
ner with his star and club. It will exert a 
wholesome influence on their minds to have it 
supposed that he continues to run things at 
the headquarters." There is doubt about the 
existence of God; but he is a very useful idol 
to have in the family. Heaven may be a myth; 
but encourage the people to believe in it. 
Hell it is difficult to localize in harmony with 
the researches of modern geography; but it is 
not a bad idea to burn a little brimstone now 
and then, on the sly, in some secluded corner 



170 



TO THE PEOPLE? 



of the cellar, and let its saving fumes spread 
through the house. "Sure," said one hunter 
to another, "sure phwat are yez follerin that 
rabbit fer? Yer gun ain't loaded an yez havn't 
no ammynition ! " "Sh! the rabbit don't know 
it." So we hope to corral the rabble of hu- 
manity into the fold of virtue by pursuing 
them with our antique firelocks, though the 
flint and tinder are lost, and the ammunition 
box empty. 

If, according to the saying which 1 have 
quoted, a religion which is false in the eyes of 
the philosopher, is useful in the eyes of the 
magistrate as long as it seems true in the eyes 
of the people, then it would appear unwise to 
preach the whole truth to the people. Better 
stint their minds than damn their souls. Let 
them cherish a false faith here that they may 
be happy hereafter, if there be any hereafter. 
And at any rate it will be much better for 
them, and a good deal more comfortable for 
us, if we can wheedle them into behaving them- 
selves in this case by the imaginary terrors of 
a life to come. 



SHALL WE PREACH THE WHOLE TRUTH 171 



There is an old Russian adage which runs, 
"There are fools enough in the world for our 
purposes." Ah, but that depends on what the 
purposes are. If it be our purpose to enlighten 
humanity, then we shall find fools enough that 
need enlightenment. If it be our purpose to 
build up a religion on the basis- of foolishness, 
we may, to our disappointment, find the avail- 
able fools increasingly few. President Lincoln 
once remarked: "You can fool all the people 
some of the time, and you can fool some of the 
people all the time, but you can't fool all the 
people all the time." And the number of those 
people who can be fooled all the time may not 
turn out to be so large as we had supposed. I 
have not much confidence in the possibility of 
fooHng many men into a real heaven through 
the fear of an unreal hell. I know that we 
sometimes overestimate the intelligence of the 
people. Quite as often we underestimate it. 
I do not find an Emerson or a Sumner in every 
man that walks the streets. Nor do I find in 
many of the men that walk the streets a total 



172 



TO THE PEOPLE? 



inability to detect flaws in the religious and 
political doctrines that have been bequeathed 
us. As a rule they are pretty quick to find 
out whether the gun is loaded or not. The 
most startling and perilous skepticism that 
prevails to-day respecting religious questions 
is not among the educated few; it is among 
the people. 

We protestants think of the Roman Catholics 
as the most superstitious part of Christendom, 
and some of us think it well that they con- 
tinue to believe the Pope infallible that by his 
artificial authority he may help keep them in 
order. But some of you can recall citizens of 
this place who within your recollection have 
broken entirely loose from the Roman church; 
and you can recall others who, though they 
still take the sacraments from their priest, 
would not take from the Pope himself any 
dictation as to the tangible concrete interests 
of their every-day life. Even with the people 
of Ireland a belief in the infallibility of the 
Pope of Rome hangs by a very slender thread. 



SHALL WE PREACH THE WHOLE TRUTH 173 



In fact, as you know, who have for the last 
few years followed the course of history in that 
unfortunate island, the Pope keeps up his au- 
thority among them in spiritual things by 
adroith' avoiding coming into collision with 
them in temporal things. They practically say 
to him, "Let us follow our own" judgment in 
matters that we all know something about, and 
we will follow your judgment in matters that 
we do not any of us know much about. Recog- 
nize our right to direct this life as seems to us 
best, and we will recognize your infallible au- 
thority respecting the life to come.' 1 

And just as a faith in the infallibility of the 
church is fading out among the Roman Cath- 
olics, so a faith in the infallibility of the Bible 
is fading out among the people of Christendom. 
You and I sometimes say to ourselves, "We 
know that the Bible contains imperfections 
and contradictions and absurdities, but let us 
not tell the masses so. There is no need of our 
telling them so." They are fast rinding it out 
without our aid. A neighbor of mine, to all 



174 



TO THE PEOPLE? 



appearances as ignorant and unintelligent as 
any neighbor that I have, a man whose sur- 
roundings and antecedents have been orthodox, 
was hanging over my fence a few days ago, and 
considerately endeavoring to find some topic of 
conversation that would interrupt the mowing 
of my lawn. I do not recall how it came about, 
but he finally hit on human longevity, and he 
somewhat startled me with the unexpected ob- 
servation, "I rather guess that Methuselah did 
not live to be nine hundred and sixty-nine 
years old. Yes," he added with a rationalistic 
chuckle, "there must be a mistake about that 
somehow." When the people attain to making 
jokes about Adam's rebellious rib, and Jonah's 
three days wrestle with gastric juice in his 
novel conveyance, and even those famous swine 
that sought to drown the devils in the sea, 

when, I say, the people begin to laugh 

over these things, which is just what they are 
doing to-day, the restraining influences upon 
their conduct of a belief in the Bible as an 
infallible book is about at an end. 



SHALL WE PREACH THE WHOLE TRUTH 175 



But there is a more serious matter, my 
friends, than the impossibility of permanently 
fooling the people. I say to my little girl, 
"Don't touch the ink bottle, it will bite." A 
happy thought; a very convenient way of pre- 
venting the premature waste of writing fluid 
which should be converted into sermons. The 
scheme works well. She does not touch the 
ink-bottle for a while, and I am saved a deal 
of trouble. Ah, but the terrible awakening, 
when, on the sly she finally makes the experi- 
ment of touching the ink bottle, and finds out 
that it does not bite, and feels sure that I all 
along knew that it would not bite. My neat 
device for preventing her from meddling with 
the ink bottle will be of no use to me hereafter ; 
and worse still, I stand before her an unmasked 
liar. Henceforth she will probably suspect me 
of falsehood even though I may be telling her 
the eternal truth. It is a perilous experiment 
thus to play with sincerity; to seek to build up 
character or creed by teaching people or allow- 
ing them to keep on believing that ink bottles 



176 



TO THE PEOPLE? 



bite, when we know that they do not bite. 

There is the germ of a great truth wrapped 
up in the Catholic doctrine of an infallible 
church. That truth is the reverence due to 
any institution of the past, though it has ceased 
to meet the needs of the human soul. There is 
the germ of a great truth wrapped up in the 
Protestant doctrine of an infallible book. That 
truth is the fact that in all ages the thoughts of 
saint and seer have been, and are, in a most 
real sense of the word, visions of God. Partial 
visions indeed, imperfect visions; but in their 
very partialness and imperfection prophecies 
of the still larger vision that shall be. The 
Bible in which we believe includes the Jewish 
Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures; but 
it includes much more. It includes all right 
thinking, all clear seeing, whether of the nine- 
teenth century or of the first. It includes such 
words as I have read in your hearing this 
morning — "A man must remember that while 
he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent 
of the future; and that his thoughts are as 



SHALL WE PREACH THE WHOLE TRUTH 177 



children born to him which he may not care- 
lessly let die. " 

I say that the germ of truth in the Catholic 
doctrine of an infallible church is the reverence 
due to institutions of the past although they 
have ceased to meet the needs of the human 
soul. The germ of truth in the Protestant 
doctrine of an infallible book is the presence of 
the divine voice in all noble literature. Keep 
on teaching the people that the Catholic church 
or the Protestant Bible is infallible, and when 
they find out, as some day they certainly will, 
that both are fallible and that you knew it, you 
will have undermined their confidence in you 
and so your influence on them. You will, 
through their reactions against these false and 
unreasonable claims in behalf of church and 
Bible, have blinded them to whatever excel- 
lencies are to be found in church or book. You 
will have postponed their acceptance of those 
larger truths which these exaggerated doctrines 
held in germ. The hell of fire and brimstone 
is no longer believed in by intelligent men. 



178 



TO THE PEOPLE? 



Keep on trying to make the people believe in 
such a hell, and when they find out that there 
is no such hell, they will jump to the conclu- 
sion that there is no hell. Ah, there is noth- 
ing more real than hell! Have you never 
found yourself in hell? Then has your lot 
been happy. Have you never seen a neighbor 
in hell? Then have your eyes been blind. 
Hell, we say, is nowhere, because, like Heav- 
en, it is not a place but a condition. Hell is 
nowhere because it is everywhere. Wherever, 
whenever a man thinks an impure thought, 
cherishes an impure desire, does an impure 
deed, there and then has he taken one step 
farther into hell. Keep on teaching the people 
to believe in an unreal hell, and when that hell 
vanishes in thin air before their eyes, as some 
day vanish it must, they will be ready for the 
falsest, the most pernicious doctrine ever 
preached, namely, that no matter what we do or 
are, we shall all get to heaven by and by. 

Right here is the fatal vice in much that is 
called liberal orthodoxy now-a-days. I say 



SHALL WE PREACH THE WHOLE TRUTH 179 

this in all kindness; some of my dearest and 
most highly prized friends train in that school. 
Their purpose is of heaven; their method lays 
hold on hell. The preacher deliberately tells 
his people half the truth, and allows them to 
keep on thinking half the falsehood, expecting 
that they will catch up with him by and by 
and make it safe to be sincere. Have you 
never heard it said of a man, "He is a good 
deal more liberal in private than he appears to 
be in public." What a damning compliment! 
May it never be yours or mine to hear ad- 
dressed to us the words, "I~~was thirsty for the 
waters of life, and you pressed to my lips the 
cup of falsehood. I was hungry for the whole 
truth, and you fed me on lies. " 

"What do you think, my boy," asked the 
mother who was teaching Johnny his Sunday- 
school lesson, "what do you think Lot did 
when he saw his poor wife turned into a pillar 
of salt?" "I don't know, mamma; I spec' he 
wondered where he could get a fresh one." A 
fresh wife is better than a pillar of salt, even 



180 



TO THE PEOPLE? 



though not so durable. It is not the highest 
compliment to say that a doctrine has been 
preserved unchanged through the ages. When 
a doctrine crystallizes in such shape that it 
will keep just as it is forever, it is high time to 
turn from the traditions of the past to the vis- 
ions of the present; high time to seek a fresh 
statement that shall draw its warrant from the 
eternal "I am." We are doing the people a 
sorry service if we withhold from their life the 
larger truth of to-day. 

We are often enjoined not to proclaim a new 
truth until the time is ripe for it. How do 
times ripen? Not by a man's postponing the 
utterances of his fresh thought until other men 
begin to think as he does; but by a man's 
promptly proclaiming his fresh thought and 
thus helping make other men think as he does. 
"The highest truth a wise man sees, he will 
fearlessly utter, knowing that let what may 
come of it, he is thus playing his right part 
in the world, knowing that if he can effect the 
change he aims at, well; if not, well also, 
though not so well." 



SHALL WE PREACH THE WHOLE TRUTH 181 



Human progress is not an unconscious 
growth, with which individual human beings 
have nothing to do; human progress is a con- 
scious growth with which individual human 
beings have everything to do. Would you 
have the times ripe for your new thought? 
Proclaim that new thought and so help ripen 
them. Thus did Jesus, in defiance of the im- 
pending cross. Thus did Socrates, with the 
deadly hemlock ready for his lips. Thus have 
done all great souls who have faithfully played 
their part in the world. When is it your duty 
to utter a new truth? Just as soon as you dis- 
cover that new truth. When will your neighbor 
be helped by hearing that new truth? Just 
as soon as he can comprehend that new truth. 
The savage Hindoo believes in a God who 
boils the wicked in caldrons, rolls them down 
mountains bristling with knives, and saws them 
asunder. We say, and we say rightly, that this 
belief in such a cruel God helps restrain the 
Hindoo from wicked conduct. We however 
feel that such punishment on the part of God 



182 



TO THE PEOPLE? 



would be outrageously cruel, and therefore we 
think that there is no such God. How soon 
shall we tell the Hindoo so? Just as soon as 
he can understand us; for just as soon as he 
can appreciate with us that such conduct on 
the part of God would be outrageously cruel, 
just so soon will the worship of such a God 
begin to brutalize him instead of elevating 
him; just so soon will the worship of such a 
God begin to make him not better but worse. 

How then shall we find out when he can un- 
derstand our belief and when therefore we shall 
preach that belief? Try him. Proclaim it, 
and leave the outcome with the Eternal. If 
we can effect the change we aim at in the Hin- 
doo creed, well; if not, well also, though not 
so well. A doctrine is of service to a man only 
so long as it remains the largest expression of 
truth that he can comprehend. 

And let. us remember that the value of any 
false doctrine in human history has been due 
not to its shell of falsehood, but to its kernel 
of truth. It is not the cruelty in the savage 



SHALL WE PREACH THE WHOLE TRUTH 183 



Hindoo's false conception of God that restrains 
his conduct. It is the fact that every crime 
will receive its sure penalty; that is, express- 
ing the thought in the language of to-day, every 
act of yours or mine will entail its own unfail- 
ing consequence for good or ill through all 
eternity. 

As the tourist moves through the Alps in the 
region of the avalanches, the Swiss guide en- 
joins the strictest silence lest the mere vibra- 
tion of the voice should loosen one of those 
huge chunks of ice and send it rolling down to 
the valley below, with death and destruction 
in its train. So we stand in the presence of 
these masses of error which hang on the sum- 
mits of human thought. They are so insecurely 
poised that a breath may dislodge them. We 
dare not utter a word lest we send them tum- 
bling down the mountain side, overwhelming 
some heedless soul toiling his way up toward 
the heights of the spiritual life. And this does 
sometimes happen. The transition from an 
old half truth to a new truth is often a period 



184 



TO THE PEOPLE? 



of moral unsettlement, of moral danger. Thus 
souls are sometimes sacrificed. But only thus 
can souls come to their full inheritance of 
truth. Only thus can the rains of heaven, long 
locked up on the snow-capped peaks of crys- 
tallized creeds, be released from their impris- 
onment and come back in refreshing showers 
to the valley below. Or, to change the picture, 
the mother takes her life in her hand when she 
consents to bring into the world the son or 
daughter that shall be. But only thus with 
pain and peril are the generations born. 

I have great respect for those timid souls 
that shrink from proclaiming their first thought 
lest they thus imperil the well-being of their 
fellow-men. But what does this peril reveal? 
It reveals a lack of faith — of faith in truth, 
of faith in God, the soul of truth. 

George MacDonald once said, "The hell 
which a lie will keep a man from is doubtless 
the best place for him to go to." Perhaps 
MacDonald was right. Perhaps the only heaven 
worth living in is a heaven reached along the 
pathway of truth. 



SHALL WE PREACH THE WHOLE TRUTH 185 

You remember that in the "Old Town Fire- 
Side Stories" we are told of the mishap that 
befell old parson Morrel. Once during the 
long prayer in the morning service, the good 
preacher, who "hed a way o' prayin' with his 
eyes open," happening to look through the 
window into the open ground around the meet- 
ing house, was convulsed with merriment on 
seeing the havoc that a certain horned beast of 
the field was making with his most respected 
deacon. This was a pretty heinous offense, 
that the minister should break out into laugh- 
ter in the middle of the prayer. A council of 
the church was called to try the case, and this 
was in substance their verdict: "There hedn't 
no temptation took parson Morrell but such as 
is common to man; but they advised him after- 
wards allers to pray with his eyes shet. " This 
is the common practice. When we meditate 
on the deep things of life we close our eyes lest 
we see something that may unsettle our faith. 
I would this morning stimulate that larger 
faith which shall fit us to stand in God's pres- 



186 



TO THE PEOPLE? 



ence with our eyes wide open ; that larger faith 
which shall nerve the tongue to proclaim what 
the e5 T e hath seen. 

I seek to bring home to every individual 
here the personal responsibility that is his in 
ushering in the kingdom of a larger truth. The 
Chinese have a legend about a company of 
people who were to shout in unison, and each 
one kept still that he might hear the others. Is 
man to find the truth? Then men must find 
it. Is man to hear the truth? Then must 
men proclaim it. May we all be quickened 
with a sense of that duty which belongs to 
each one of us to give to our neighbors the 
best, the largest, the truest thought that is in 
us, remembering that if we can arouse some 
slumbering soul to catch that thought 'tis well; 
if not, well also, but not so well. 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." — 
Psalm xiv. r. 

"You have heard," said Jesus, "that it was 
said to them of old time, 'Thou shalt not kill, 
and whoever shall kill shall be in danger of 
the judgment,' but I say unto you, that every 
one who is angry with his brother shall be in 
danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall 
say to his brother, Raca (an expression of con- 
tempt) shall be in danger of the council; and 
whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in dan- 
ger of the hell of fire." (Matt. v. 21-24). 

I have met a saying in apparent formal defi- 
ance of both the psalmist and Jesus: "He is 
a fool who saith no man hath said in his heart 
'There is no God.'" 

Let us complete our texts with a stanza from 
Lowell: 

"He who has deepest searched the wide abysm 
187 



188 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



Of that life-giving Soul which men call fate, 
Knows that to put more faith in lies and hate 
Than truth and love, is the true atheism." 

There was quite common in the olden time 
a quick and convenient method by which peo- 
ple got rid of a man who was odious to them 
on account of either his character or his opin- 
ions. The method has been concisely summed 
up in these words, "Give a dog a bad name 
and then hang him." 

I suppose this method must be regarded as a 
distinct moral advance on the still earlier one 
of hanging the dog without first giving him a 
bad name. If we are thus summarily to dis- 
pose of our enemy, it would indicate a certain 
sense of equity on our part should we take the 
pains to blacken his character before he goes. 
It is a somewhat refreshing display of instinct- 
ive homage to justice when a man calls a dog 
a bad name as a justification for hanging him, 
unpleasant as the proceeding may be even then 
for the dog. 

Our constitutions and customs in these later 
days, however, have pretty rigidly circumscribed 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



189 



our use of the time-honored injunction, "Give 
a dog a bad name and hang him." Hanging 
the dog has been quite generally taken out of 
the field of our personal judgment and taste, and 
even under the stricter forms of modern juris- 
prudence is growing quite rare. The only lux- 
ury that is left us as individuals is to call the 
dog a bad name, and with that luxury the ordi- 
nances of state and society do not very greatly 
interfere. 

Although there are some more recent names 
which are competing for distinction as abusing 
epithets, the term still regarded in the religious 
world as the most proper one with which to 
designate a dog that ought to be hung, is athe- 
ist. 

Polycarp, the Christian martyr, set the ex- 
ample of retaliation by hurling back the igno- 
minious epithet at the heads of his accusers 
when condemned by the Roman authorities to 
die for his atheism, in denying their gods. 
Defiant to the last, the old man boldly arraigned 
them for atheism in denying his. I greatly ad- 



190 WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



mire Polycarp's pluck, I do not, however, care 
to imitate his example. I hope that nothing 
that I may say to-day in defense of prophets 
of the soul whom I revere, will be construed 
as indicating a desire to get even with their 
defamers in calling names. I rather wish to 
inquire whether it is worth while to call anybody 
an atheist; and if worth while, for what opin- 
ions the word ought to stand. 

There have been comparatively few people 
in the world who have called themselves athe- 
ists. The English poet Shelley did, though 
his atheism seems to have consisted in rejecting 
current conceptions of deity, while his verses are 
filled with a reverent recognition of the Eternal, 
Omnipresent Power for whom I know no truer 
name than God. Some of the actors in the 
bloody drama of the French Revolution of 1789, 
were avowed atheists. But Robespierre, the 
bloodiest of all. was not among them. He was 
an ostentatious theist. While in power, he 
recognized God officially, and ordained the 
formal worship of the Supreme Being as one of 
the legitimate functions of the state. 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



191 



While the list of prominent men who have 
called themselves atheists is quite short, the 
list of prominent men whom other people have 
called atheists is very long. 

Socrates was condemned to death by his 
countrymen as an atheist, although he main- 
tained that a divine power was ever at hand 
guiding his acts and words. Spinoza, the Jew- 
ish philosopher, was called an atheist, although 
so posssesed with a sense of the omnipresence 
of deity that he has been described as "a God- 
intoxicated man." George Eliot was called an 
atheist because she found collective humanity 
divine enough to worship. Emerson was called 
an atheist because his conception of God broke 
through the narrow bounds of personality and 
became the impersonal, indwelling, everywhere 
present Soul. Herbert Spencer is called an 
atheist, although he bases his entire system of 
philosophy upon an infinite, eternal power by 
whom all things are created and sustained. 
Even Theodore Parker has been at times loosely 
associated with atheism, though one is puzzled 



192 WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



to understand how any one could apply even 
the milder term "skeptic" to so intense a be- 
liever. It is related that a certain good woman 
once happened to hear Parker preach without 
knowing at the time who he was. She was 
charmed with his glowing religiousness, and 
enthusiastically remarked at the close, "That 
was a grand sermon. How I wish that it could 
have been heard by that infidel Theodore Park- 
er. " 

Indeed one can hardly understand how it is 
that some people are so free with their scath- 
ing characterizations and criticism of men like 
Spencer and Emerson and Parker, unless they 
have followed the wise rule which Lowell puts 
into the mouth of Reverend Homer Wilbur, 
in the Biglow Papers. Wilbur was disgusted 
with the extremes to which men like William 
Lloyd Garrison were pushing the anti-slavery 
agitation, and remarked of their journal "The 
Liberator," "It is a print whose heresies I 
take every proper opportunity of combating, 
and of which, I thank God, I have never read 
a single line." 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



193 



How happens it that atheist has been so fa- 
vorite a term in the vocabulary of theological 
Billingsgate? How happens it that men have 
been so fond of branding as atheistic the relig- 
ious opinions which they wished to condemn? 
Clearly because to doubt the existence of God 
was thought to be an especial offense in trie 
eyes of God. 

The origin and character of this idea will, I 
think, repay a little examination. The idea 
that God is especially offended with any man 
who doubts his existence, seems to be a sur- 
vival of an idea that was natural to polytheistic 
times, when men believed in many gods. In 
that early day, the various rival deities were 
eager to receive the exclusive devotion of men. 
Every God was thus hostile to those who did 
not worship him ; especially if they belonged 
to a race of which he was the particular pa- 
tron, to whose worship he thus had a sort of 
pre-emptive right. For the Hebrew to ignore 
Jahweh and worship Baal, or for the Phoenician 
to ignore Baal and worship Jahweh, was thus 



194 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



religious treason, the gravest sin of which a 
man could be capable. It was even a more 
heinous offense than it would be to-day if, 
during a war between France and America, an 
American should desert the stars and stripes for 
the tri-color, or a Frenchman the tri-color for 
the stars and stripes. 

Gradually among the Israelites, as well as 
among other peoples, polytheism gave way to 
monotheism, a belief in many gods to a belief 
in one God; but the old notion of treason to 
one's own god as the supreme sin, was dragged 
along and in a vague way retained among the 
new ideas. As in the previous period, to ig- 
nore Jahweh was to cast in one's lot with his 
rival, Baal, so jiow to ignore or deny the one 
only God was to cast in one's lot with the 
devil, or in some indefinite and indefinable way 
to array oneself against him before whom we 
all should bow. 

Now note that the real offense of the previous 
period, the period of polytheism, has entirely 
disappeared. That offense consisted in wilfully 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



195 



deserting one's own god and going over to the 
god of the enemy, a sort of treason comparable, 
as I have said, to an American deserting the 
American flag for the tri-color during a war 
with France. According to monotheistic stand- 
ards no such offense is possible; there is no 
rival God to whom we can desert, unless we 
conceive of the devil as one, and deliberately 
to desert a powerful Jehovah and enlist in the 
service of a devil, doomed eventually to fall 
beneath the might of the omnipotent one, is 
deliberately to abandon assured victory for 
assured defeat, a bit of stupidity possible only 
with an idiot or lunatic. Moreover, deliberately 
deserting God, and going over to his arch ene- 
my, is not atheism, it is anti-theism; it is not 
disbelieving in the existence of God, but delib- 
erately rebelling against him — a very different 
matter. 

If I mistake not, there prevails in the popu- 
lar mind a serious confusion between these two 
ideas. Atheism is confounded with what I have 
called anti-theism. The atheist is thought of, 



196 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



not simply as a man who cannot find God, 
but, in a sort of indefinite way, as a man who 
deliberately defies God. Whether there are 
any such men I do not know. I fancy that they 
are rare. Deliberately to shake one's fist in 
the face of the omnipotent is a pretty plucky 
performance, of which I think human nature is 
not very often capable. 

Among the myths of the ancient Greeks 
was the story of Prometheus, who, exasperated 
with the injustice and deceitfulness of Jupiter, 
waged a long contest with the great king of 
gods, heedless of the fact that he must eventu- 
ally fall before Jupiter's superior power. At 
last the king of gods bound the rebel to a bleak 
rock on Mount Caucasus. Here for thirty 
thousand years a vulture was to feed upon his 
liver which grew again as fast as it was de- 
voured to make possible the continuance of 
his torture. But through it all he remained 
unsubdued. Upheld by a higher ideal of jus- 
tice and right than that which Jupiter repre- 
sented and administered, Prometheus remained 
defiant to the last. 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 197 



If God were indeed such a monster as he has 
at times been described, I am not sure but then 
we ought to imitate Prometheus. Perhaps then 
anti-theistic defiance, though it be a hopeless 
defiance of the eternal, would be the duty of 
the highest manhood. I fear, however, that 
few of us are capable of such supreme heroism. 
At any rate we are speaking not of anti-theism 
but atheism; not defiance but ignorance of God. 
Now according to monotheistic standards, to 
be an atheist, to deny God, is to be unable 
in the midst of the bewildering maze of life to 
discover the divine hand. Shall we fancy that 
God must be exasperated at our inability, our 
weakness, our ignorance, which prevents our 
saying 'I believe in God? ' We call God Father. 
Let us see how the notion that God hates or 
is displeased with the man that doubts the 
divine existence, harmonizes with the true 
ideal of Fatherhood. 

I have a child, let us suppose, whose hard 
lot it is to be deaf. While away from home 
attending to an errand on which I have sent 



19S IVHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



him, he loses his way in the forest. The dark- 
ness comes on, I stand in my door awaiting 
his return. I call, but he cannot hear. The 
darkness has closed in on him; he cannot see. 
He gropes helplessly hither and thither, but 
the path he cannot find. He expects that his 
father will somehow seek him out; but no 
father comes. At last, in his despair I hear 
him cry out, "Alas, 1 believe my father is 
dead; I have no father." Enraged over his 
denial of my existence, I get him in my clutch 
and dash out his life. 

Did you ever think, my friends, that such is 
the very conduct which we ascribe to God when 
we think him enraged at us for not finding him, 
sending to hell all atheist children of his who. 
straining their eyes in the darkness, cannot 
discover any trace of the divine hand? Yet we 
call him Father. 

Nay, the God and Father whom I would 
worship, the God and Father whom we would 
welcome all to worship with us, if in the wild- 
erness of life his children cannot search him 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



199 



out, will search them out, until they feel his 

hand nestling in theirs, and the darkness is 

driven away, and their ears are unstopped so 

that they can hear as well as see the divine 

harmonies of the universe. Lowell exclaims, 

"Man cannot be God's outlaw if he would; 
Nor so abscond him in the caves of sense 
But Nature still shall search some crevice out, 
With messages of splendor from that Source 
Which, dive he, soar he, baffles still and lures." 

Who are the atheists? There is a contempt- 
ible atheism. The atheism which, mistakenly 
thinking there is no avenging power or princi- 
ple in human life, revels in injustice, wicked- 
ness, sin, and expects to go scot-free. 

There is an honest self-confessed or self- 
avowed atheism, the atheism which, though it 
would willingly find God in the universe, yet, 
while straining the sense to the utmost, still 
sees and hears and feels him not. 

There is an anti-theism which outrages the 
spirit of love and sympathy rightly called di- 
vine by stigmatizing as an atheist a pure-mind- 
ed thinker because he cannot accept as true 



200 WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



the standard theology, the current religion of the 
day. 

There is an honest, unavowed and uncon- 
scious atheism which consists in a distrust of 
free inquiry, of hospitality to earnest search 
after the truth, lest the throne of God be un- 
dermined. 

I am not particularly anxious to reconcile 
my texts; but they are all true. 

The psalmist is right. It is the fool who 
saith in his heart, "There is no God, no retri- 
bution; I will therefore revel in unrighteous- 
ness." He is a fool, for he has fatally misread 
the lesson of life. 

Again, it is true that "he is a fool that 
saith no man hath said in his heart there is no 
God." To many an honest eye, yes, to many 
a most brilliant mind, God is still shrouded 
and unavowed. To deny that fact, is to play 
the role of a fool. 

Jesus is right: "Whosoever shall say to his 
brother, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell 
of fire." Whosoever seeks to brand with dis- 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



201 



grace an honest man, whosoever contemptu- 
ously hurls the epithets skeptic and atheist at 
any earnest, even though misguided, mind, is 
scorching out of his own soul some of the fi- 
nest attributes of human character. 
Lowell is right: 

"He who has deepest searched the wide abysm 
Of that life-giving Soul which men call fate 
Knows that to put more faith in lies and hate 
Than truth and love is the true atheism." 

This is a form of atheism which is all too 
common among us though it goes by other 
names; a form of atheism from which you and 
I should ever be diligent to keep ourselves free. 

Of the kind of atheism which consists in a 
fear that we are going to be lost unless we shut 
ourselves up rigidly within the bounds of some 
narrow creed and shrink from gazing at the light, 
or what claims to be light, streaming upon us 
from without, the following is a rather scath- 
ing, and still perhaps wholesome, description: 
"The Scribes and Pharisees sat once in Moses' 
seat. Now they go farther up and sit in the 



202 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



seat of the Messiah. The Pharisee's faith is 
in the letter, not in the spirit. Doubt in his 
presence that the book of Chronicles and the 
book of Kings are not perfectly inspired and 
infallibly true on those very points where they 
are exactly opposite; doubt that the infinite 
God inspired David to denounce his enemies, 
Peter to slay Ananias, Paul to predict events 
that never came to pass; — and he sets you down 
as an infidel, though you keep all the command- 
ments from your youth up, lack nothing, and 
live as John and Paul prayed that they might 
live. With him the unpardonable sin is to 
doubt that ecclesiastical doctrine to be true, 
which reason revolts at and conscience and 
faith spurn with loathing. With him the Jews 
are more than the human race; the Bible is 
his master and not his friend. Had this Phar- 
isee been born in Turkey, he would have been 
as zealous for the Mohammedan church as he 
is for the Christian. It is only the accident of 
birth that has given him the Bible instead of 
the Koran, the Avesta, or the Vedas. This 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



203 



person has no real faith in man, no faith 
in God, yet this Pharisee speaks of God as if 
he had known the Infinite from his boyhood; 
had looked over his shoulder when he laid the 
foundations of the earth." 

Who is the atheist? The man that puts 
"more faith in lies and hate than in truth and 
love." The man who is afraid to think, afraid 
to face a new thought, lest it turn out to be a 
pernicious truth, or an error which the human 
mind cannot distinguish from truth. He is an 
atheist. He distrusts the value or power of 
truth, and to that extent denies God, who is 
truth. The man who fears to let a new thought 
run its free course in the world, lest the world 
be deluded thereby, and so seeks to forestall the 
influence of that new thought by covering it 
with names which he thinks odious, is an 
atheist. At any rate, he does not believe in 
more than half a God. He may be pure-minded, 
honest, sincere; such men always are. "Fag- 
got and stake were desperately sincere." But 
faggot and stake were a sort of homage to the 



204 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



superior power of the devil or error, and a 
confession of fear that unless hampered with 
unfair disadvantages or held down by physical 
force, evil is likely to come out ahead in the con- 
flict. Lowell asks, 

"Shall we treat Him as if He were a child 
That knew not His own purpose? Nor dare trust 
The Rock of Ages to their chemic tests - 
Lest some day the all-sustaining base divine 
Should fail from under us, disolved in gas?" 

Rather let these words of grand old John 
Milton ring in our ears, "Though all the winds 
of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, 
so truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by 
licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her 
strength; let her and falsehood grapple; who 
ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and 
open encounter? . . . She needs no policies, 
nor strategems, nor licenses, to make her vic- 
torious; those are the shifts and the defenses 
that error uses against her power; give her 
but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps. " 

My friends, the conspiring voices of the ages 
invite us to faith in God, the God of truth and 



WHO ARE THE ATHEISTS? 



205 



love, the God who does not divide with lies 
and hate the dominion of the universe, but 
reigns forever superior. The conviction that 
the darkness is not to be feared, for the day 
will eventually come; that error is not to be 
feared, for the truth will eventually assert her 
superior strength; that vice is not to be feared, 
for, upheld by strong arms and noble souls, 
virtue will eventually claim her own; this con- 
viction is the true theism. Unreserved surren- 
der to this conviction is the true worship of 
the eternal. 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE 
BIBLE? 



In Lowell's poem entitled "To the Past," 
which I have read to you, the poet pictures the 
decay which has overtaken old civilizations 
and then passes to the triumphant thought that 
whatever of true life there was in the past lives 
still and leaps in the life blood of to-day. 

As an illustration of the composite character 
of the Bible, I have read you the Fifty-first 
Psalm. The last two verses clearly do not be- 
long with the rest. They were undoubtedly 
written by a different man. Certainly they were 
written in a different spirit. This is hinted, 
in the revised version, by their being separated 
from the rest of the psalm, by a quite wide 
space. In the last two verses it is maintained 
that when the walls of Jerusalem are rebuilt, 

God will be pleased with the sacrifices and 
206 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 207 



burnt offerings of the ceremonial law. While 
in the first and main portion of the psalm it is 
affirmed that God has no pleasure in burnt offer- 
ings ; that the only sacrifices by which he is 
pleased consist of a broken and contrite heart. 

"Do Unitarians believe the Bible?" Said 
some unknown singer in Israel in an address 
to God, "Thou hast no pleasure in burnt offer- 
ing. " (Psalm li, 16.) We believe that. Said 
another unknown singer in Israel in an address 
to God, "Then shalt thou delight in burnt 
offering." (Psalm li, 19). That we do not 
believe. "Thou hast no pleasure in burnt offer- 
ing," "Then shalt thou delight in burnt offer- 
ing." We could not very well believe them 
both. In a very literal sense of the word it 
would be too distracting. 

Said Paul, or whoever it was, in a letter to 
Timothy, reading from the old or King James' 
version, "Scripture is given by inspiration of 
God." We do not quite believe that. In the 
new or revised version this passage reads, 
"Every scripture inspired of God is also profit- 



%m DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 



able for teaching, for reproof, for correction, 
for instruction which is in righteousness." 
That is, if a scripture is inspired of God, then 
it is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for 
correction, for instruction. That we Unitarians 
believe* It is only another way of saying that 
every book, every sentence, which is filled with 
the spirit of truth is profitable for teaching, 
for reproof, for correction, for instruction. The 
first step then to take in deciding whether a 
piece of literature is profitable is to inquire 
whether that book or part of a book is good 
and true. Now some things in the Bible seem 
to us good and true, and we are therefore glad 
to use them in the cultivation of the moral and 
spirtual life. There are other things which to 
us seem not good and true. Possibly they were 
in advance of the times when they were written ; 
they are behind our time. They may have been 
of service once. They are of no service now, 
except as materials for the study of religious 
history. I pick a mollusk out of a fossil-bear- 
ing rock; it was good food once, palatable, 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 209 



nutritious, this oyster of the early day. But 
I would better not try to eat it now. I should 
find it a pretty hard thing to swallow; and if 
I succeeded in swallowing it, it would lie 
heavily in my stomach. This fossil is of de- 
cided value in helping me study the develop- 
ment of ancient life; but it is no longer of any 
value as food. So with some of these ancient 
texts. They are fossils. They help us in 
studying the development of the moral and re- 
ligious life of man. They are petrified remains 
which tell us how far the race had journeyed 
when they were acceptable to the mind. But 
they are not good food now. We find them 
pretty hard to swallow; and even if we succeed 
in swallowing them, they make us spiritual 
dyspeptics. 

In the fourteenth chapter of the book of 
Deuteronomy, a book which claims to be made 
up of laws given by Moses to the people of 
Israel, it is directed that every man shall take a 
tenth of his harvest, and the firstlings of his 
flocks once a year and go up to the temple to 



210 DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 



take part in a great sacred feast. But if he 
lives too far from the temple, then he is to sell 
the tenth of his harvest, and the firstlings of 
his flocks, and take the money instead. When 
he gets to his journey's end he is to use this 
money in buying food and drink for this visit. 
And these are the directions which according 
to Deuteronomy Moses received from God and 
gave to the people as to the expenditure of the 
money: (26 v.) "And thou shalt bestow the 
money for whatsoever thy soul desireth, for 
oxen, or for sheep or for wine, or for strong 
drink, or for whatsoever thy soul asketh of 
thee." I believe that there are churches in 
Menomonie founded on the doctrine that the 
Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the 
Bible is the infallible word of God. Which 
one of them would dare to inscribe over pulpit 
or altar these sacred words: "Sell a tithe of 
thy corn and the firstlings of thy flock and go 
buy strong drink." We have in this country 
a large and powerful organization which in 
many ways has done and is doing a great deal 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 211 

of good. It is founded on the doctrine of the 
Bible, the whole Bible and nothing but the 
Bible. It limits its full membership to people 
in good standing in evangelical churches. Uni- 
versalists and Unitarians need not apply. They 
are too much given to the sacrilege of tamper- 
ing with the word of God, taking whatever in 
the Bible suits them and omitting the rest. 
Where is the leader of a Young Men's Chris- 
tian Association that would be willing to stand 
at the door of his hall on a Sunday afternoon 
and as the young men enter greet them with 
the sacred admonition: "Sell a tithe of thy 
corn and the firstlings of thy flock and go buy 
strong drink." 

Now this old text, this fossil text, will not 
do us any harm to-day, if we do not try to 
swallow it. Indeed, treated rationally it is of 
decided value in tracing the moral development 
of the races. It serves as a land mark to show 
how much progress humanity has made since a 
time when one of the most religious races of 
the world thought it not only proper to use 



212 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 



strong drink but even to use it at a solemn 
festival held in honor of their God. And this 
ancient text did not probably do any harm 
when it was written. It did not help to en- 
courage the use of strong drink then, for every- 
body used it, and thought it right to use it. 
There was no total abstinence issue in those 
days. Nobody preached or practiced total ab- 
stinence. The mischief comes in when one of 
these old injunctions, which was well enough 
in its day, is perpetuated and regarded as sa- 
cred and binding even when it is already out- 
grown, when the better sentiment of society has 
left it far behind. 

This worship of ancient texts, bad enough 
even when the texts are properly interpreted, 
becomes grotesquely bad in the atmosphere of 
that narrow literalism which Bibliolatry en- 
courages. Some of the ancient Jewish Rabbis 
opposed classical study, the study of Greek and 
Latin, on scriptural ground; they said, "It is 
written, Thou shalt meditate on the law day 
and night; find an hour that is neither day nor 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 213 



night and in that hour you may study Greek." 
The passage, "Compel them to come in," taken 
from one of the parables of Jesus, has been 
used to justify persecution as a means of co- 
ercing people into joining the church. Per- 
haps the climax of absurdity was reached in 
the claim that deaf mutes could not be saved 
because Paul says, "Faith comes by hearing." 

The Unitarian policy in dealing with the 
Bible, looking at it not as a religious history 
but as a religious text-book, is then the policy 
of eclecticism, the policy of the fanning mill. 
As long as we possess an instrument by which 
we can separate the wheat from the chaff it 
seems unwise to eat both. 

But it is said, "If I am to use my own rea- 
son in deciding what portions of this religious 
text-book are valuable and what are useless, 
then it ceases to be an infallible guide. " Very 
true; but do you realize that we protestants 
are all in substantially the same boat? As re- 
gards an infallible guide, the Romanist seems 
to have the advantage of us. He has an infal- 



214 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 



lible book and an infallible church to interpret 
it for him. The orthodox protestant has an in- 
fallible book but no infallible church to inter- 
pret it for him. Every man is to interpret it 
for himself, by his own fallible reason; and 
an infallible book interpreted by a fallible rea- 
son ceases to be an infallible guide. 

Years ago the Presbyterians interpreted this 
infallible book as best they could and produced 
the Westminster Confession of Faith. They still 
regard the Bible as all true, but many of them 
think their Confession of Faith very largely 
false. And so they propose to interpret once 
more this infallible book by means of the falli- 
ble reason and of course they will get another 
fallible creed. It is to be noted moreover that 
their opinion that most of the Westminster 
Confession of Faith is at fault, is not based up- 
on a critical study of the Bible which has 
brought to light mistakes in their former inter- 
pretations. The Westminster Confession of 
Faith, for instance, teaches the eternal damna- 
tion of unbaptized infants. Now entirely apart 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 215 



from Bible-study, these revisers have come to 
reject this horrible doctrine. They reject it 
because it is horrible, not because a more care- 
ful study of the Bible reveals some passage 
which condemns it. And so, while still cling- 
ing nominally to the belief that the Bible is 
the only final authority in matters of faith, 
they propose to interpret the Bible, in such a 
way as to leave the damnation of infants out. 
It was the famous preacher Michael Wiggles- 
worth who assigned to damned babies the easiest 
room in Hell. It is proposed now to go a 
step further and admit unquestioned inno- 
cence into heaven. Now in proposing to 
change their creed so as to make it harmonize 
with their own higher ideals, the revisers are 
unconsciously or half consciously recognizing 
the reason as a final authority lying back of 
and superior to the Bible itself. Some of them 
squarely avow this view. In a recent discus- 
sion a prominent Presbyterian somewhat pas- 
sionately exclaimed that if the Bible taught 
anything so horrible as the decree of reproba- 



216 DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 



tion and damnation of infants he would tear 
his Bible into shreds. But that would be very 
foolish, very much after the fashion of the child 
who tips the table over because there are some 
dishes on it that he does not like. 

You remember the unsophisticated youth who 
found himself for the first time in a restaurant 
where he had to wrestle with a bill of fare. 
He began at the beginning and loyal]}' took 
everything as it came for a while. At last he 
b^gan to despair and calling the waiter said to 
him. in very humble and plaintive tones. "If 
it isn't agin the rules, I would like to skip from 
there to there." It is no disrespect to your 
host not to eat everything that he sets before 
you. Suppose that some passages in the Bible 
did teach reprobation and the damnation of 
infants, do not tear your Bible to pieces. Leave 
such passages out of your text-book of religion. 
Simply put them into the cabinet provided for 
theological fossils. It is hardly worth while to 
throw the sweet corn out of the window because 
you do not like cabbage. Hardly worth while to 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 217 



give up the Sermon on the Mount because some 
old Hebrew lawgiver justified selling one's 
crops and investing the proceeds in strong 
drink. 

This process of selecting from the Bible for 
our use whatever seems good, true and of pos- 
itive value, and ignoring the rest, seems to 
some people not only difficult but also pre- 
sumptuous. It is so much more modest as well 
as easy to take the Bible, the whole Bible and 
nothing but the Bible. Ay, but who does it? 
Is there a minister in this city who would be 
willing to stand before his congregation on 
Sunday mornings and read the whole Bible? 
Do you know a father who would care to gather 
his boys and girls about him and study with 
them in detail every chapter of this sacred 
book? There are, you know, in the earlier 
portions of the Old Testament, particularly in 
Genesis, passages which are condemned by the 
more refined standards of modern times. It is 
not fair to call them obscene in the sense in 
which we apply that term to literature specially 



218 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 



designed to appeal to and cultivate the lower 
instincts. These passages in Genesis had no 
such purpose. They are simply coarse. The} 7 
belong to that primitive period when a respect 
for what we call the proprieties was not yet born, 
that state of civilization which reveled with 
bold impartiality in the elegant and the gross. 
Innocent however in intention as were these 
crude legends, we do not read them in our 
drawing-rooms. It is commonly understood 
that the Episcopal church in its first morning 
and evening lessons reads the Old Testament 
through once a year. My curiosity was aroused 
a few months ago to ascertain whether this was 
strictly correct. I took a prayer book and 
carefully examined the prescribed readings. I 
found that the most objectionable of these 
Genesis stories are left out. Several chapters 
containing tedious accounts of old Hebrew 
laws and genealogies are also omitted. Also 
there are entire books that do not appear at 
all. Among these is the Canticles or the so- 
called Song of Solomon. The reason for this 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 219 



omission is obvious. Take a King James' ver- 
sion of the Bible and turn to Solomon's Song. 
You will find prefixed to the chapters, headings 
which tell you that the book is made up of a 
conversation between Christ and the church. 
Read the chapters themselves and you will 
not find a single reference to either the church 
or Christ. Now these chapter headings are no 
part of the book. They were added centuries 
afterward by some unknown commentator who 
wanted to give a spiritual significance to the 
Song. Turn to the revised version, the Bible 
which we Unitarians so largely believe, and 
these chapter headings disappear entirely. 
They disappear because, as every scholar knows, 
they are no part of the Bible. This so-called 
Song of Solomon turns out to be a love poem, 
a poem indeed of a quite pure and elevated, 
though rather unintelligible kind; but a poem 
in no distinctive sense of the word religious 
any more than a play of Shakspeare. What 
I wish you to bear in mind is that if a comu- 
nicant in the Episcopal church were to attend 



220 DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 

morning and evening services every day in 
the year, and listen attentively to the prescribed 
readings, there are considerable portions of 
the Bible which he would not hear, though the 
Episcopal church does not advertise the fact. 
Quietly and in a small way that church does 
just the very same thing that we Unitarians 
do more openly and in a somewhat larger way. 
It selects from the Scriptures whatever it thinks 
profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correc- 
tion, for instruction in righteousness, uses 
it and omits the rest. Thus have our ortho- 
dox friends like ourselves adopted the policy 
of the fanning mill. We differ from them only 
in making the meshes of our sieve somewhat 
smaller. 

Do Unitarians believe the Bible? The phrase 
has an odd sound. It seems to assume that if 
we do not accept everything in the Bible, we 
are calling its authors liars. We do not ask, 
Do you believe "Looking Backward;" we ask, 
Do you believe that the social theories expounded 
in 'Looking Backward" are correct? I believe 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 221 



them fatally incorrect; but that is not saying 
that I think Mr. Bellamy a liar. I simply think 
him in error. So with the Bible. I think the 
psalmist mistaken when he thought that God 
would be pleased with burnt offerings. More- 
over, odd as it would sound to hear a man ask, 
Do you believe "Looking Backward?" it would 
sound odder still to hear him ask, Do you be- 
lieve American literature? But that is pre- 
cisely parallel to the question. Do you believe 
the Bible? for the Bible is a collection of Jew- 
ish and early Christian literature, a collection 
of books written by different men at different 
times, and of very different ideas on many 
points. 

We believe then that the Bible, the whole 
Bible, is valuable as a record of the social, the 
intellectual, moral, religious development of 
the Jewish race. In addition we believe that 
there are portions of the Bible which are of 
value because of their direct application to the 
needs of the human soul to-day. How much 
there is of this kind in the Bible will be an- 



222 DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 



swered very differently by different men. With 
many persons, old associations render helpful 
some Biblical texts which otherwise would be 
thought of no value. A friend of mine not 
long ago at his family devotions, read with 
decided apparent satisfaction and profit a chap- 
ter from Paul's letter to the Romans. The 
phraseology was familiar and seemed to give 
some consolation and strength; but when ques- 
tioned as to what Paul meant my friend had to 
confess that he had not the slightest idea. There 
is a famous chapter in the book of Job that is 
very popular on funeral occasions because it is 
supposed to teach the doctrine of personal im- 
mortality. As a matter of fact it teaches the 
exact reverse, that "man lieth down and riseth 
not." The actual utility of many passages is 
determined not so much by what they contain 
as by what they are supposed to contain. A 
friend once asked me how much of the Bible 
I found personally helpful. As material for 
the study of religion, I would not lose a single 
legend. So too when translated from the con- 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 223 



ditions of ancient to the conditions of modern 
life the spirit of most of the Bible appeals to 
our better natures. My friend's question meant 
how much of it do I find immediately helpful 
in guiding my conduct and solving the deep 
problems of the soul to-day. I had to answer, 
Only a little. How could it be otherwise? The 
conditions of human life and thought change 
greatly in five or even two thousand years. 

I am told that it has been said of me as a 
serious offense that I "think Emerson as good 
as the Bible"; and this view is thought to con- 
tain a covert insult to Jehovah. But my dear 
friend, do you mean to say that you think neither 
Emerson nor any other writer of modern times 
is as good as the Bible? If so, is not that an 
insult to Jehovah? Is God dead? Is God 
dumb? Is he no longer as able and willing 
to raise up a prophet of the soul as he was 
two thousand years ago? Is he no longer as 
able and willing to whisper his eternal truth 
into the listening ear to-day as when a Moses 
or an Israel, a Jesus or a Paul sought God in 
Palestine? 



224 DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 



"Thou hearestnot well the mountain organ tones 
By prophet ears from Hor and Sinai caught, 

Thinking the cisterns of those Hebrew brains 

Drew dry the springs of the All-Knower's thought. 

* * * * 

God is not dumb, that he should speak no more; 

If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness 
And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor; 

There towers the Mountain of the Voice no less. 

* * * * 

Slowly the Bible of the race is writ, 

And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone, 

Each age, each kindred, adds a verse to it, 
Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan. 

While swings the sea, while mists the mountains shroud, 

While thunder's surges burst on cliffs of cloud, 
Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit." 

Precious to us be this ancient Hebrew writ. 
Let us draw from it whatever can make life 
holier and more true. More precious be that 
larger Bible which includes these, but includes 
much more. Let us miss none of its many 
messages. Most precious be all of that Bible 
whose texts of loving God, the omnipresent 
Spirit of Truth, if we will but yield ourselves to 
our better impulses, will write in letters of 
eternal life on the tablets of our souls to-day. 



DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE THE BIBLE? 225 



May we hear this voice with some fresh ful- 
ness now. May we heed this voice with an 
ever-quickening loyalty in the hours to come. 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



Mark xvi. 16:" He that believeth not shall be damned.'' 

I have called this an atrocious saying. And 
it is. I have said that there is no reason for 
believing Jesus to have been the author of it. 
He undoubtedly was not. Yet though it would 
be difficult to read much inspiration out of that 
text, I am not sure but that one could read an 
important truth into it. Let us see. 

We are to inquire, "What do Unitarians be- 
lieve?" Yet not with purpose to answer the 
question completely, but simply to talk about 
it. 

The story goes that a certain good old lady, 
one of the Scotch Covenanters, was once re- 
luctantly compelled to confess that she did not 
know much about her creed ; but she vigorously 
added that she was prepared to "mainteen" it 
against the world. So we might say that Uni« 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 2Z7 



tarians are unable to tell you much that they 
collectively believe; but what they individually 
believe, that they are ready to maintain against 
the world. 

The last twelve verses of the second gospel, 
the one ascribed to Mark, are undoubtedly 
spurious. These verses are indeed printed still 
in the revised version; but the margin informs 
us that they are not found in the oldest Greek 
manuscripts. Among these there is one which 
for eighteen centuries has been doing its best 
to curse the world. It is put into the mouth of 
Jesus. "He that believeth and is baptized shall 
be saved; but he that disbelieveth shall be 
condemned," or as King James' version has it, 
"He that believeth not shall be damned. " Who- 
ever was responsible for that atrocious utter- 
ance, we may feel sure that Jesus was not. Let 
us turn rather for our inspiration this morning 
to the most unbelieving, the most skeptical 
book in the Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes, xii, 
13-14: "Let us hear the conclusion of the 
whole matter: Fear God and keep his command- 



228 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



ments; for this is the whole duty of man, for 

God shall bring every work into judgment, with 

every secret thing, whether it be good, or 

whether it be evil." And now let me add the 

words of Lowell. 

"Perhaps the truer faith that is to come, 
Will see God rather in the strenuous doubt, 
Than in the creed held as an infant's hand 
Holds purposeless whatso is placed therein." 

The failure or refusal of Unitarians to blazen 
upon their banners an explicit statement of be_ 
lief, a string of affirmations so plainly written 
that he may run that reads, is variously interpret- 
ed. Sometimes we are accused of being ashamed 
to publish to the world the faith that is in us. 
Sometimes we are considerately regarded, not 
as cowards, but simply as incompetent. It is 
said we refuse to tell other people what we be- 
lieve, because we do not know ourselves. We 
are in the condition of the young man, the son 
of a good minister, who was tried for stealing 
chickens. While the court was waiting for 
the jury to bring in their verdict, the father in 
his distress appealed to the boy, "My son, did 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVt? 



229 



you steal those chickens?" "Did I steal them," 
was the reply, "did I steal them? Why father, 
how can I tell till the jury comes in?" Some 
day our critics hope the jury will come in with 
its verdict on Unitarianism. Then, say they, 
we shall be able to tell the world what Unita- 
rians believe, because then we shall know our- 
selves. 

I can well understand that the Unitarian at- 
titude is almost incomprehensible to a person 
trained from childhood to regard a creed as 
an essential basis on which to found a church. 
Many of us were taught this view. We were 
taught, that is, that in order to join a church, it 
is necessary for a person to assent formally to a 
list of assertions about things in Heaven above, 
and in the earth beneath, and in the place where 
there is no water to spare, under the earth. 

This old notion about the basis of church 
organization and membership, the notion that 
a church must be based upon a creed, involves 
two curious ideas: 

First, that in order to be saved, that is, in 



230 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



order to be admitted to Heaven when I am 
through with this earthly life, I must, before 
I am through, give my intellectual assent to a 
number of theological propositions. 

Secondly, that the purpose of the church, or 
one of its purposes, is to select out of the 
world those who have been saved, w T hose calling 
and election have been made sure. The church 
thus is a sort of recruiting agency. Its mission 
is to anticipate or prepare for or begin that 
sifting which is to be completed in the great 
Judgment Day. Of course it will not render 
much assistance to that ultimate tribunal unless 
it does its work well. If the record need to be 
all gone through with item by item in the great 
accounting room above, then it might just as 
well not have been kept at all in the prelimi- 
nary office here below. It is therefore highly 
important that the church should not admit or 
retain in its membership those who are not 
fit to pass the final muster. 

You who have read that recent religious 
novel, frequently spoken of in connection with 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 231 



"Robert Elsmere," "John Ward, Preacher, " by 
Mrs. Margaret Deland, will remember that 
these two ideas are entertained by the hero of 
the story. It is true that these ideas at the 
present time are seldom adhered to as relig- 
iously as by Mrs. Deland's imaginary preacher ; 
still they are not by any means extinct. John 
Ward not only believes that the non-elect will 
be eternally damned, but also that any person 
who does not believe this is among the non- 
elect. If I believe that no one will be eternally 
damned, it will follow 7 as a consequence of my 
unbelief of other's damnation that I shall be 
eternally damned myself. A man's salvation, 
that is, is made dependent upon his being, as 
the book phrases it, grounded on hell. Accord- 
ingly when Ward's wife, Helen, openly avows 
her rejection of this horrible doctrine, it be- 
comes necessary to take disciplinary steps, 
either to bring her back to the saving faith, or, 
failing in that, to expel her from the church, 
that the church may be kept pure, composed 
solely of such as the dread tribunal that we 



232 WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



are approaching will admit into Heaven. 

Now Unitarians refuse to base their churches 
on a creed because they reject those two prop- 
ositions which the creed basis implies. They 
do not believe that an intellectual assent to 
any doctrinal proposition whatever, is directly 
essential to salvation or is directly and imme- 
diately saving. And they do not believe that 
the mission of a church is to cull out and keep 
in the fold those that have been saved. 

Xhere is indeed, we think, something essen- 
tial to salvation. Of that I will speak in a 
moment. We do not believe that that thing 
is intellectual belief. "Thou believest that 
God is one, " says the epistle ascribed to James. 
"Thou doest well: the devils also believe and 
tremble." 

They tremble and, have reason to tremble, 
because in spite of the belief they are devils 
still. 

There is indeed a truth in my spurious text. 
There is a sense in which it is true that he 
that believeth not shall be damned. Yes, 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



233 



and he that believeth shall be damned. It all 
depends on what you believe or disbelieve and 
on the strength with which the belief or the 
disbelief takes hold of and molds your soul. 
In so far as belief or disbelief either enobles 
or degrades the character, to that extent and 
in that way, belief or disbelief is either saving 
or damning. To believe that God of his mere 
good pleasure has selected some men for eternal 
misery, is to run a great risk of at least par- 
tial damnation; for to worship such a God is 
quite likely to stifle those sentiments of justice 
and mercy which are lacking in this divine 
ideal, but are essential ingredients in pure and 
noble human character. To believe, on the 
other hand, that there is no hell in the unholy 
soul, is to run a great risk of at least partial 
damnation; for it is to throw away one of the 
most potent deterrents from unrighteous living, 
the conviction, namely, that every sin leaves a 
lasting stain upon one's inmost self. But Ire- 
peat, Unitarians do not think that intellectual 
belief or disbelief in itself, without regard to 



234 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



its effect upon the character is essential to sal- 
vation. 

One of the old legends recorded in the book 
of Judges tells us that in a war between the 
Ephraimites and the Gileadites when the Gil- 
eadites were gettng the better of their enemies, 
fugitives from Ephraim endeavored to pass 
themselves off as Gileadites and thus escape 
death. To prevent this deceit, the men of 
Gilead required the fugitives to say Shibboleth. 
Now the Ephraimites could not pronounce cor- 
rectly the first sound in that word, they called 
it Sibboleth. Thus if a man asked permission 
to cross the ford of the Jordan which the Gil- 
eadites were guarding and was able to say 
Shibboleth, he was allowed to pass; but if his 
lips betrayed him with their Sibboleth, he was 
slain. 

Unitarians do not expect th£t the divine tri- 
bunal will require or accept any Shibboleth, 
even the one which time and tradition have 
made to some of us most sacred. "I believe 
in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God" — Uni- 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 235 



tarians do not believe that even this will be 
accepted as a passport to eternal life. They 
do not expect that any Shibboleth of honest 
doubt is going to consign a man to eternal death. 

' Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed 

In one self place; fpr where we are is hell 

And where hell is, there we must ever be." 

"I sent my soul through the invisible. 

Some letter of that after life to spell, 

And by and by my soul returned to me, 

And answered, I myself am Heaven and Hell." 

' The truer faith that is to come 

Will see God rather in the strenuous doubt 

Than in the creed held as an infant's hand 

Holds purposeless whatso is placed therein." 

But again, I say Unitarians refuse the creed- 
basis of church organization because they re- 
ject the notion that the mission of a church is 
to cull out and keep in the fold those that have 
been saved. They believe rather that the mis- 
sion of the church is to save men. If we were 
required to make any discrimination, instead 
of receiving to our membership the saints and 
rejecting the sinners, we should receive the sin- 
ners and reject the saints. We need for the 



236 WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



good of our own souls to bring ourselves, into 
close contact with struggling souls about us, 
our fellowmen who are seeking to rise on step- 
ping stones of their dead selves to higher things. 
I say we need this for the sake of our own 
souls. For the only way in which a man can 
perfect his own salvation, is by engaging in the 
divine work of saving others. And so, above 
all, we want on our list of members not those 
who have "got religion" but those who want 
to get it, those whose hands are eager to grasp 
the hands of their struggling fellowmen in mu- 
tual helpfulness towards the higher life. The 
more slips we make, the more we should be 
made to feel that the loving arms of a really 
saving church are clasped about us in still 
closer embrace. The farther we get from the 
high possibilities of our manhood, the wider 
open should be the church door, not for our 
expulsion, but for our return. 

If anybody has really, as the phrase goes, "got 
religion," got it in all its fullness, got all there 
is of it, well, — God pity him! However, he too 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 237 



will be very welcome to our membership. The 
perfect saints, when we can find them, we 
shall be glad to admit, provided they will con- 
sent to come. Of course the association will 
not do them any good, but they will be de- 
lightful company, and contact with them will 
be an excellent thing for the rest of us. 

In this connection let me read the bond of 
uniou adopted by our society in this place. 
While these covenants or bonds of union 
differ very greatly among different Unitarian 
churches, and it is in fact rare to find two 
exactly alike, I know of no Unitarian church 
which makes personal assent to anything that 
could be properly called a creed a condition 
of membership. Here is our own bond of union : 

"We whose names are hereunto subscribed, 
desiring a religious organization which shall 
make integrity of life its first aim, and leave 
thought free, associate ourselves together as 
the Unitarian society of Menomonie, and ac- 
cept to its membership all, of whatever theolog- 
ical opinion, who wish to unite with us in the 



238 WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



promotion of truth, righteousness, reverence, 
and charity among men." 

We have, I say, no creed. There is no defi- 
nite list of doctrines to which a person must 
assent in order to become a Unitarian. There 
is no explicit statement to which one can point 
as the standard theology of Unitarianism. In- 
dividually every Unitarian, in or out of the 
pulpit, is at full liberty to believe, not in- 
deed as he may choose, but as he sees. 

We must however carefully distinguish: to 
say that Unitarians have no creed is not to say 
that no Unitarian has a creed. Every Unita- 
rian has his own creed, more or less positive, 
more or less complete. He has, that is, his 
private convictions; some of them he regards 
as established beyond all question, others he 
views as still invested with more or less un- 
certainty. Respecting those topics commonly 
called theological, such, for instance, as God, 
Immortality, the Bible, Jesus, I suppose the 
average individual Unitarian is about as capa- 
ble as members of other denominations of tell- 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



239 



ing you what he believes; with perhaps this 
qualification: We insist strenuously on be- 
lieving, not as we wish, but as we find; be- 
lieving not what we think should be true, but 
what according to the best evidence in our 
possession is true. We are strongly convinced 
that a belief should not be created out of one's 
personal fancy, but out of accredited fact. 
Now in dealing with such profound and trans- 
cendental themes as Immortality and God, some 
of us frequently find ourselves at the limits of 
well established human knowledge; and when 
we reach that boundary, it seems the honorable 
course, and the only honorable course, not to 
supplement our knowledge with our imagination 
but to acknowledge our ignorance, and frankly 
say, "I do not know." 

What I personally believe about these theo- 
logical themes, about the Bible, Jesus, Immor- 
tality, God, Human Life, I have been trying 
to tell you, with I know not how much suc- 
cess, in all my preaching. 

Unitarians, I say, have no uniform creed* 



240 WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



We have not that convenient system which en- 
ables people to find out what a man believes 
by simply learning his classification — just as, if 
you tell me that this bell jar is filled with car- 
bonic acid gas. I know that it contains carbon 
and oxygen, or if you tell me that there is an 
ox in your garden, I know that the animal has 
four legs, and cloven hoofs, and no front teeth 
on his upper jaw. Our system does not make 
it possible to construct in one's imagination 
the whole man when simply shown his label, 
just as the naturalist can construct in his 
imagination the whole animal when shown a 
fragment of one bone. It naturally happens, 
however, that men unfettered by tradition, 
recognizing no test of truth except its intrinsic 
reasonableness, reach to a considerable extent 
the same conclusions; and thus we can point to 
sundry quite specific statements of faith which 
represent with a good deal of accuracy the 
convictions of Unitarians as a whole. 

The best brief statement of this sort with 
which I am acquainted is a little leaflet, copies 



IVHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 241 

of which have been placed on the table near 
the door to which you are invited to help your- 
selves if you desire them. It should be con- 
stantly kept in mind, however, that this is not 
a Unitarian creed in the sense of being univer. 
sally accepted or unchangeable. It contains, 
as the title states, "The things most commonly 
believed to-day among us." There are indi- 
vidual Unitarians who do not to-day accept all 
the statements contained in this statement. 
And perhaps there will not be any Unitarians 
who will accept them all to-morrow; for it is 
one of our fundamental ideals to admit un- 
flinchingly, yes, eagerly, what ever new light 
to-morrow may bring. 

Personally I accept without qualification this 
specific statement of faith. 

I have spoken of this little statement of faith 
as containing only the things most commonly 
believed to-day among us, not being either 
universal or unchangeable. There is however 
one doctrine believed among us which in the 
very nature of the case must be both universal 



242 WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



and unchangeable. We could not abandon it 
without ceasing to be Unitarians. It is nec- 
essarily contained in those two convictions on 
which, as I have said, our organization is 
based, namely, first, that no intellectual be- 
lief is directly and in itself saving; and sec- 
ondly, that the purpose of a church is not to 
collect the saints but to save the sinners. 
This fundamental doctrine of ours, without a 
belief in which no man can become or remain 
a Unitarian, is involved in the statement of 
purpose in our own bond of union, — -"the pro- 
motion of truth, righteousness, reverence, and 
charity among men." This universal and un- 
changeable foundation-stone of Unitarianism is 
a belief in a trinity — for we too, Unitarians as 
we are, have our trinity. The first person in 
that trinity is Character; the second person 
is Character; the third person is Character, 
and were we heretical enough to have (not so 
conservative as to object to having) four per- 
sons, instead of the traditional three, in our 
God-head, the fourth would still be Character 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 243 



— character growing out of an internal but all 
permeating spirit of purity, character express- 
ing itself in upright and self-denying lives. 

Hillel, the famous Jewish Rabbi, who lived 
in the latter half of the first century before 
Christ, was once asked by an eager inquirer to 
give him the sum and substance of Judaism 
while standing on one foot. The great He- 
brew teacher answered with a negative form 
of the golden rule, "Do not to others what you 
do not like others to do to you." "All else, " he 
added, "is only comment on that underlying 
principle." If one should desire from Unita- 
rianism any such compendium of salvation, the 
answer would be in substance, "Righteousness 
is salvation, all else is only comment on that 
underlying principle." Note that I do not say 
that righteousness will be rewarded with salva- 
tion, but that righteousness is salvation. The 
two are but the opposite sides of the same 
thing, absolutely inseparable. When, to use 
Emerson's quaint idea, we succeed in cutting 
clean off the upper surface of a thing so thin 



244 WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



as then to be left bottomless, then, and not 
till then, may we hope to sunder those Siamese 
twins of human character and have either sur- 
vive the operation. Then, and not till then, 
may we hope to get salvation without right- 
eousness or righteousness without salvation. 

And as inseparable as are salvation and 
righteousness, so inseparable on the other hand 
are damnation and sin. 

"Hell hath no limits," the Italian poet Dante 

puts into the mouth of sinful souls: 

"Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed 
In one self place, for where we are is hell, 
And where hell is, there we must ever be." 

There is a genuine truth in our spurious text, 
"He that believeth not shall be damned." He 
that believeth not in purity and truth is damned 
already. Not even omnipotence could save 
him. An anciet poet saw this truth and sung, 
"I sent my soul through the invisible, 
Some letter of that after life to spell, 
And by and by my soul returned to me, 

And answered, I myself am Heaven and Hell." 

I was talking once with a young lady who 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIE KB? 245 



had just heard her first Unitarian sermon. In 
the ©ourse of the conversation she remarked, 
"Unitarianism must be a very pleasant belief." 
I thought so too; but somehow I was led to 
suspect a serious misapprehension in her com- 
ment, and on inquiry I ascertained that she had 
got the impression that Unitarians and Uni- 
versalists alike believed that everybody whether 
saint or sinner is to be ushered at death into 
perfect bliss. I do not exactly know why any- 
body should call that a pleasant belief. It is 
to me inconceivable; and were it conceivable, 
it would be loathsome. There is nothing at- 
tractive to me in the thought of our being 
swine for a few years on earth just because that 
temporary indulgence in filth is not to prevent 
our being. saints in Heaven for evermore. But 
pleasant or unpleasant, conceivable or incon- 
ceivable, nothing could be farther from the 
whole spirit and teaching of Unitarianism, and 
from the spirit of Universalism as well. Possi- 
bly some such doctrine was promulgated by a 
few Universalists in Hosea Ballou'sday. But 



246 



WHAT DO UNITARIAXS BELIEVE? 



so far as I know, nothing like it is now heard 
in any Universalist pulpit, nor has been heard 
there for many years. 

We do not believe, indeed, in an eternal 
Hell into which God thrusts sinful souls, de- 
liberately arresting the natural process of decay 
and death for the sake of making possible un- 
ending suffering; and we do not believe in 
any Hell into which God puts a good man as 
a penalty for his honest intellectual conviction 
whether true or false. But we do believe and 
have always believed in Hell as a most awful 
and terrific fact in every unholy soul — a hell 
out of which or into which as you will, you 
and I may be growing to-day. 

A few days ago while reading the "Story of 
an African Farm," I came across this paragraph 
with which I will close: "In the end experi- 
ence will inevitably teach us that the laws for a 
wise and noble life have a foundation infinitely 
deeper than the fiat of any being. God or man 
— even in the ground work of human nature. 
She will teach us that whoso sheddeth man's 



WHAT DO UNITARIANS BELIEVE? 



247 



blood, though by man his blood be not shed, 
though no man avenge and no hell await, yet 
every drop shall blister on his soul and eat in 
the name of the dead. She will teach that 
whoso takes a love not lawfully his own gath- 
ers a flower with poison on its petals: that 
whoso revenges, strikes with a sword that has 
two edges. — one for his adversary, one for 
himself; that who lives to himself is dead, 
though the ground is not yet on him: that who 
wrongs another clouds his own sun: and that 
who sins in secret stands accused and con- 
demned before the one Judge who deals eternal 
justice, — his own all-knowing self." 



JESUS. 



Matthew xvi. 15: "But who say ye that I am?" 

Jesus of Nazareth, not known in the oriental 
world, has played a conspicuous part in our 
western life. His name and history are thor- 
oughly woven into our literature; his ideas 
have exerted no small influence on our thinking, 
his spirit has been potent in molding our char- 
acters. 

The question of his nature and rank still com- 
mands wide-spread interest, and we may well 
regard as addressed to us the question of my 
text, "But who say ye that I am?" 

I shall endeavor this morning to give you the 
answer of the most recent rationalistic scholar- 
ship. The magnitude of the subject and the 
limited time at my disposal will compel me to 
speak very cursorily, and even without pre_ 

senting the grounds on which the conclusions 

248 



JESUS 



249 



rest. I shall, as before, be grateful for any 
questions or objections which may suggest 
themselves to your minds, and shall enjoy the 
privilege of considering them with you either in 
public or private as may be the more conve- 
nient and practicable. 

In order to understand the intellectual and 
spiritual development of Jesus, we must keep 
in mind the social conditions amid which he 
was born and reared. The Jews were at this 
time under the yoke of the Roman Empire. 
During the long period of their subjection to 
various foreign powers there had been grow- 
ing up a belief in the coming of a Messiah who 
should restore the fortunes of the chosen peo- 
ple of Jehovah. "Hope springs eternal in the 
human breast." It must not be thought that 
this expectation was uniform and definite. It 
was quite shadowy and vague, and assumed at 
different times and with different classes and 
individuals very different forms. 

With some persons it was merely the confi- 
dence that in the natural order of things there 



250 



JESUS 



would eventually come a king, of the line of 
David, who would collect and reunite the scat- 
tered tribes and restore the political fortunes 
of Israel. This was connected in other minds 
with the belief that this leader would be sus- 
tained by the supernatural power of Jehovah, 
and that he would put an end to the existing 
social order and establish anew the kingdom 
of God on earth. The Persian notion of a bod- 
ily resurrection and millennial era of prosperity 
had found a large foothold. The better edu- 
cated of the Pharisees probably adhered to the 
belief of the prophets of the Jews during the 
time of the captivity in Babylon, namely, that 
Israel herself was to be the Messiah, the Mes- 
siah of the nations who was to lead the world 
from polytheism and idolatry to the pure wor- 
ship of the one true God. And this was to 
be brought about, not through a great political 
leader but through the establishment of right- 
eousness and the strict compliance with the 
commands of Jehovah. By the masses of the 
people however, it was undoubtedly anticipated 



JESUS 



251 



that some one personal deliverer was to usher 
in this era and assume control of this restored 
kingdom. 

Ideas of this sort were prevalent in Palestine 
at the advent of Jesus. 

He was pretty certainly born in Nazareth, a 
town in Galilee. The story of the birth at 
Bethlehem bears the unmistakable stamp of 
being a later legend and probably grew out of 
a desire to make the life of Jesus tally with 
the second verse of the fifth chapter of Micah. 
Bethlehem was the city of David. In this 
verse in Micah the prediction that some king 
of the house of David would arise to restore 
prosperity to his people has grown into this po- 
etic form, "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, 
which art little to be among the thousands of 
Judah, out of thee shall one come forth unto 
me that is to be ruler in Israel." When very 
early the Christian notion that Jesus was the 
one expected Messiah took on a definite shape, 
naturally the endeavor was made to associate 
him with all of those characteristics and pre 



252 



JESUS 



dictions which had been regarded as Messianic. 
Out of this desire, not as a deliberate fabrica- 
tion but as a gradual development it is prob- 
able that the Bethlehem story grew. Jesus 
must have first seen the light in Bethlehem; 
for he was the Messiah, and there, according 
to the prophet, was the Messiah to be born. 
That Nazareth was his actual birthplace is 
attested by the fact that he was unquestionably 
a Galilean and that he is uniformly associated 
with that town in the Gospels. It was never 
Jesus of Bethlehem but Jesus of Nazareth. 
Mark, probably the most trustworthy of the 
four evangelists, makes no mention of Bethle- 
hem but simply says that he came from Naz- 
areth. The common belief rests solely on state- 
ments in the early chapters of Matthew and 
Luke; and these do not agree together. Matthew 
reads as if his family had previously lived in 
Bethlehem, and contains no reference to their 
having come there for any temporary purpose. 
Moreover, after the flight into Egypt to escape 
the slaughter of children which Herod had 



JESUS 



253 



ordered, Joseph, it appears, would, on the 
death of Herod, have returned to Bethlehem 
but for the fact that Archelaus succeeded his 
father Herod in Judea and it seemed therefore 
likely to be safer for the family in Galilee. 
Joseph accordingly withdrew to Galilee and 
settled at Nazareth, and this Matthew dis- 
tinctly says was the way in which Jesus came 
to be associated with that town. Luke, on 
the other hand, represents Joseph as living at 
Nazareth and going to Bethlehem only for the 
temporary purpose of being enrolled there with 
his kinsmen; for it is stated that every one 
had to go to his own ancestral city, and Joseph 
was of the family of David. 

It may be remarked in passing that there is 
no historical evidence of any such enrollment 
as Luke represents to have occurred at this 
time, or any custom which required families to 
be enrolled at the dwelling of their ancestors, 
instead of at their own home. 

I have assumed in what I have said that Jesus 
was the son of Joseph, as well as Mary. The 



254 



JESUS 



so-called miraculous conception is unquestion- 
ably a late tradition and, like similar stories 
in the case of Buddha and Apollo and other 
pagan deities and heroes, is the crude and prim- 
itive way in which the disciples and admirers 
of Jesus expressed their admiration of the lofty 
qualities and powers which he displayed. So 
much did he, in their esteem, rise above his 
fellows that he could not have been born like 
other men. The story is moreover practically 
contradicted by the genealogies in Matthew 
and Luke and they in turn seem to be con- 
tradicted by the reported words of Jesus him- 
self. 

It was, as has been stated, the common be- 
lief that the Messiah was to be of the house 
of David. Jesus, in all probability, did not 
have this royal blood in his veins; and this fact 
appears to have been used by his opponents 
and enemies as a reason why he could not be 
recognized as the Messiah. To this objection 
he seems to be replying in a fragmentary con- 
versation recorded in the first three gospels. 



JESUS 



255 



He quotes from a psalm at that time supposed 
to be David's, a passage regarded as referring 
to the Messiah in which the author of the 
psalm calls him Lord. If, then, argues Jesus, 
David calls him Lord, he could not have been 
his descendant, his son. 

At a later period, however, in order to satisfy 
the demand that the Messiah should be a de- 
scendant of David, there grew up fanciful gen- 
ealogies which traced the descent of Jesus 
from that famous king. Two of these, radically 
different from each other, are found respect- 
ively in Matthew and Luke. 

Now 7 a belief in the miraculous conception 
could not have been prevalent when these 
genealogical tables took their rise, for they 
trace the descent from David, not through 
Mary, but through Joseph, so that according 
to the later fancy of the single human parent- 
age of Jesus, these genealogies could have no 
significance whatever. 

Joseph was a carpenter, and it is likely that 
during the years of his early manhood Jesus 
followed the occupation of his Father. 



256 



JESUS 



His public ministry lasted for only a single 
year. This is the representation of the first 
three, or synoptic, gospels; and although the 
time seems very short to accomplish what he 
did, the account is much more trustworthy 
than that of the fourth gospel, the gospel as- 
cribed to John, which lengthens the period 
from one year to three. 

His entry upon his career as a preacher of 
righteousness is not however to be thought of 
as abrupt. Those years during which we fancy 
him to have been working at his father's side, 
were doubtless years of preparation, of serious 
prayerful thought. The woes of his people lay 
heavy on his soul. The prevalent worldliness 
and wickedness seemed to him the reason why 
Israel had been given over to her enemies. He 
seems to have thoroughly imbibed the current 
conviction that this unfortunate condition of 
things was not to last, that the kingdom of 
heaven was in some form at hand. To the 
furtherance of that coming kingdom he finally 
came to consecrate his life. 



JESUS 



257 



Exactly what part he himself expected to 
play in this coming kingdom it is not easy to 
decide. Indeed his own expectation was prob- 
ably far from fixed, and may never have taken 
on a very definite form. There is reason, how- 
ever, for believing that near the close of his 
career he was led to accept for himself the 
role of Messiah, on which his admiring dis- 
ciples were eager to have him enter; and he 
probably anticipated a speedy personal triumph 
which he was not permitted to enjoy. It seems 
clear that he did not regard it as his mission 
to die upon the cross and by a vicarious atone- 
ment satisfy the vengeance of God; but rather 
to live, and by his words of inspiration, by 
his life of purity and self devotion, bring about 
that condition of society which must precede 
the establishment of the kingdom of heaven on 
earth. 

Tradition has wreathed his name with a 
host of miraculous deeds. Some of these have 
been recorded in the four gospels of our New 
Testament. The most startling and extrava- 



258 



JESUS 



gant of them are, however, to be found only 
in those apocryphal books which were never 
admitted to the sacred canon. Viewed as a 
primitive and child-like way in which the early 
Christian centuries paid tribute to his spiritual 
greatness, these stories are very suggestive and 
inspiring. Viewed as actual occurrences, they 
greatly detract from his exalted seriousness and 
dignity. 

I have quoted before the trenchant query of 
Carlyle, "On what ground can a man who can 
make iron swim come along and claim the right 
to teach me religion?" There is no essential 
connection between ability as a miracle-worker 
and authority as regards spiritual truth. But 
not only is the common argument from mira- 
cles totally inconclusive as regards the truth- 
fulness of the gospels of Jesus; it seriously 
impairs the picture which the imagination 
faintly paints of the teacher of Nazareth. The 
rational admirer dislikes to think of him as 
playing the role of the mountebank, startling 
a gaping multitude by his marvelous deeds 



JESUS 



259 



instead of winning their hearts by his sweet 
reasonableness and appealing to their minds 
by his words of wisdom and truth. And it is 
reassuring to know not only that the alleged 
miracles rest on inadequate historical founda- 
tion, but that there is some ground for be- 
lieving that he actually disowned the possession 
of miraculous power. 

It appears from Mark (and the same account 
is given with some added embellishments in 
Matthew and Luke) that the Pharisees sought 
to discredit him with the multitude because of 
his failure to prove his authority by working 
miracles. He is represented as grieved at the 
insensibility of the people to the pure force of 
truth, and at their eagerness for that meritricious 
display which appealed to the physical sense in- 
stead of the innerspirit. With aquaintsimplicity 
the second Gospel says that "he sighed deeply 
in his spirit, and saith, Why doth this genera- 
tion seek a sign? Verily I say unto you, there 
shall no sign be given unto this generation." 

Now if he was not born of a virgin and was 



260 



JESUS 



not even a descendant of David, if he did not 
curse a barren fig tree or turn water into wine, 
if he rose not from the dead in his physical body, 
but only in the minds of his admiring disciples, 
if his blood did not wash away our sins and 
shield us from the consequences of our conduct 
and make it unnecessary for us to be con- 
tinually upright in order to attain the highest 
possibilities of happiness here and hereafter, 
then what interest have we left in Jesus of 
Nazareth? This is substantially the question 
that is continually addressed to the rationalist 
who rejects the miraculous but still persists in 
reverencing the Galilean preacher of righteous- 
ness. 

A few weeks ago I had an interesting chat 
with a college classmate whom I had not seen 
for the previous ten years. He had heard of 
my proposed change of occupation, and having 
known something of my previous history and 
being of an intensely religious nature he was 
desirous of canvassing with me again some of 
those lines of religious inquiry of which we had 



JESUS 



261 



thought and talked in our undergraduate days. 
We spoke with the same freedom and candor 
with which I have been speaking to you; and 
at the close of our two hours conversation, 
with some degree of pain and no little sur- 
prise, he inquired, "What then have you left 
to preach to the people of Menomonie?" 
There was an evident implication that I 
should do better to remain in the school-room. 
My skepticism had not invaded the multipli- 
cation table. I still believed that a straight 
line is the shortest distance between two 
points. 

What left to preach? How pitifully mate- 
rialistic the standard which would exalt miracle 
above morality, would make escape from a 
burning pit a more inspiring achievement than 
the realization of the virtues taught in the 
Sermon on the Mount : and finds nothing worth 
proclaiming in the golden rule, unless gar- 
nished with seme grotesque departure from 
natural law at birth or death. What have we 
left in Jesus of Nazareth! 5 Whatever truth he 



262 



JESUS 



taught and whatever virtue he exemplified. 
What more can any sane soul desire? 

Jesus received, as a legacy from the more 
advanced of the Hebrew prophets and from the 
most elevated ideas of his time, the conviction 
that Jehovah was not a mere tribal God; not, 
as believed in an earlier day, the God of 
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; but the God and 
Father of the whole human race. And this 
thought, a long stride toward the modern rec- 
ognition of the universal brotherhood of man, 
he made an essential part of his gospel, and 
presented to the world with fresh earnestness 
and force. 

He received as a legacy from the more advanced 
of the Hebrew prophets and from the most ele- 
vated ideas of his time, the conviction that 
uprightness of heart and life was the true prep- 
aration for the approaching kingdom of 
God. And this thought, this truth, which 
Matthew Arnold declared to be the heart of the 
Old Testament, the secret of the Eternal; viz: 
that righteousness is salvation, Jesus pro- 



JESUS 



263 



claimed as against the Pharisaic formalism of 
his age. 

He made a distinct advance on his time in 
the recognition of the immeasurable value of 
every human soul. This is the idea which 
underlies the missionary enthusiasm of Chris- 
tian history. This is the idea which Mr. 
Arnold called the heart of the Old Testament, 
the secret of Jesus' saying, "He that will save 
his life shall lose it, he that will lose his life 
shall save it." This is perhaps the distinctive 
word which Jesus offers to you and me to-day. 
It means the consecration of our powers not 
simply to the cultivation of private virtue, 
though that is a noble end and not to be ig- 
nored, but to the promotion of the interests of 
our fellow men. It means the furtherance of 
that era which Jesus anticipated, which is 
slowly coming though not in the form in which 
he expected it, and not through the abrupt in- 
terposition of Jehovah — the kingdom of God on 
earth. 

I have endeavored, now, to answer the ques- 



264 JESUS 

tion briefly, to set forth what, according to the 
latest critical research, was the career of Jesus 
of Nazareth, the man of Galilee, who so charmed 
the souls of his disciples that they rightly rec- 
ognized him as, in an especial sense, divine. 

A worshipful tradition has overlaid him with 
miracle and legend and myth. Rationalism 
would strip off these obscuring trappings and 
as far as posible behold him as he was in all that 
lovable humility which molded the hearts of 
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, of Peter 
and James and John. 

Theology has erected him into a dogma, it 
has metamorphosed him from a natural, intel- 
ligible, saving human soul, into an artificial, 
unintelligible abstraction, the center of a mys- 
tical scheme of salvation. It has relegated 
him to Olympus as the deified Christ, the au- 
stere judge too far removed from humanity to 
be a real power in winning the heart and mold- 
ing the life. Rationalism would restore him 
to his rightful place, as Jesus of Nazareth, the 
carpenter's son, the tender and helpful elder 
brother, the peasant-prophet of Galilee. 



JESUS 



265 



"Was he then," we are asked, "only a man?" 
I would as soon think of asking concerning the 
Himalayas as they tower toward heaven, "Do you 
believe they are only mountains? " Only mount- 
ains? Yes, but on their summits rests ever 
more the eternal sunlight of God. Only a man? 
Yes, but a man that speaks eloquently to us 
of the possibilities of that common humanity 
with which we are endowed, through having 
lifted himself above the ordinary round of hu- 
man passions into the serene heights of purity 
and self-devotion. 

This rehumanization of Jesus, this recalling 
him from the vague and inaccessible abode of 
the gods and clothing him once more with the 
possible attributes of human nature — is this a 
degradation? 

With the ancients the sun was a resplendent 

deity, with each recurring day traversing the 
heavens from his palace at the eastern horizon 
to his palace at the west. He was Phoebus 
Apollo, sitting in his burning chariot and 
guiding his furious steeds through the blue 



266 



JESUS 



vault above our heads. Science has dispelled 
the pretty illusion. The sun is nothing but a 
ball of fire; fire, like that which cooks our food 
and warms our homes. Nothing but a ball of 
fire? Yes, but the marvels which have revealed 
themselves to the eye of the scientist in the 
tiniest speck of flame far exceed all those myth- 
ical marvels with which the crude fancy of a 
primitive age invested the huge ball of fire 
above our heads. The sun nothing but a ball 
of fire? Yes, but at his bidding frost and snow 
have fled; leaf and bud are awakening to new- 
ness of life, and the promise of the harvest will 
yet be realized. 

Jesus only a man? Yes: but at the invita- 
tion of his human virtues, over and over again 
the cold and frost of human selfishness have 
been melted away, flowers of moral excellence 
have bloomed in the heart, and a rich fruitage 
crowned a noble and self-denying life. 

Jesus only a man? Nay, he was nothing less 
than a man. 

"His life was gentle, and the elements 



JESUS 



267 



So mixed in him that nature might stand up, 
And say to all the world, This was a man." 

We can pay him no higher honor than by 
saying as the most critical scholarship does 
say, that in an unusually large measure he dis- 
played the exalted possibilities of human na- 
ture-^those possibilities out of which, as hu- 
man heroes here and there have manifested 
them in partial and imperfect forms, we have 
framed our ideals of the divine. 

The message which a reverent rationalism 
would urge upon the world is not that there 
was less of God in Jesus, but that there is more 
in every man ; that human nature is rooted in 
the divine; that the task of life is to convert 
these divine possibilities which are present in 
our souls into the divine actualities of noble, 
upright, philanthropic living. 

Let that be the significance of Jesus for the 
nineteenth century; and for you and me. 

"'Christ,' some one says,' was 'human as we are:' 
'Why. then, for Christ,' thou answerest, who can care.' 
So answerest thou; but why not rather say, 



2G8 



JESUS 



'Was Christ a man like us? Ah, let us try 
If we then, too, can be such men as he." 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM. 



Galatians vi. 2 and 5: "Bear ye one another's burdens, 

and so fulfill the law of Christ For each man shall 

bear his own burden." 

I have referred in my talks on political and 
social questions to socialism and individualism 
as opposite extremes. As the name suggests, 
socialism begins with society as the unit; indi- 
vidualism, as the name suggests, with the in- 
dividual. Socialism would have the govern- 
ment largely responsible for mapping out and 
directing our lives; individualism would leave 
it for us to map out and direct for ourselves. 
Socialism says, or seems to say, "Bear ye one 
another's burdens." Individualism says, or 
seems to say, "Each man shall bear his own 
burden." Thus, I repeat, they seem to say; 
and the distinction seems very simple. But 
that distinction is not so simple as at first ap- 
pears. 

269 



270 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 



Recently, within, say, the last ten, or even 
five, years, there has been growing quite a 
strong sentiment in favor of socialism. Some 
form of socialism, or nationalism, as one spec- 
ial form of it has been named recently, has 
aroused the sympathy of many of our most in- 
telligent and high souled men and women. 
Nationalism, in some form and degree, has cap- 
tured many of our pulpits, and newspapers, 
and made its influence felt in moulding the 
platforms of political parties. 

Now, as a political system, nationalism, or 
any form of state socialism, under which the 
foundations of the government are enlarged so 
as to make it an elaborate machine, controll- 
ing the lives of the individual citizens, is dis- 
tasteful to me. But what I want to remark 
just now is that while the head of socialism 
seems to me to be badly astray, the heart of 
socialism is largely sound. And if I mistake 
not, it is the heart rather than the head that 
has secured for socialism so wide-spread sympa- 
thy and support. People read Bellamy's "Look- 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 271 



ing Backward" and were fascinated with it, not 
because they carefully examined and thereupon 
approved the political theory that it advocated, 
but because they were drawn toward the spirit 
that breathed through its pages. Here was a 
captivating picture of human brotherhood. We 
have long enough, they felt, been Ishmaels, 
our hands against every man and every man's 
hand against us. We have had enough of the 
tooth and the claw, enough of pitiless rivalry, 
of selfish competition, of work against, instead 
of with, our neighbors. Let us be done with 
this barbarism. Let us learn to bear one an- 
other's burdens and so fufill the law of Christ. 

And just as men have been drawn toward 
socialism more through the sympathy of the 
heart than the endorsment of the head, more 
because the spirit of it charmed the soul than 
because the theory commended itself to the 
mind, in short, because it stood in their minds 
for fraternity, so they have been repelled from 
individualism, because it stood in their thought 
for selfishness. 



272 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 



There is an indivdualism that is but another 
name for selfishness. We speak of two schools 
of political economy, the old and the new, the 
a priori and the historical, the English, or Man- 
chester, or orthodox school, and what is some- 
times called the German or American school. 
All these terms are more or less misleading. 
You must not think that there are or have been 
two distinct parties to which it is possible to 
assign every man or book. This old or a priori 
or Manchester or orthodox school is the one 
to which belong most of the great names among 
English economists, Adam Smith and John 
Stuart Mill and David Ricardo and so on. 
Herbert Spencer, though a philosopher rather 
than an economist, is to be associated with 
them. A cardinal principle with this school 
is "the let alone policy;" thence it is some- 
times called "the laissez /aire school." This 
phrase is used to describe a system under 
which the individual is to do as he likes in so 
far as he does not interfere with the enjoyment 
of equal freedom on the part of his neighbor. 
It means individualism. 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 



273 



Now many, not ail, of this school went farther. 
They not only said -Let government keep its 
hands off and allow every citizen to do as he 
likes so long as he oppresses no other. They 
went fartner, and said that in directing his 
course every citizen should look after his own 
interest alone; he should bear only his own 
burdens and not trouble himself about his 
neighbors. They maintained indeed, that un- 
der the principle of the economic harmonies, 
if every man directly should seek his own in- 
terest alone, the interests of all would be best 
helped, but that while thus indirectly in bear- 
ing one's own burden, a man does help bear his 
neighbor's burdens, he is not to attempt to do 
so directly. He is not to think anything about 
his neighbor's interests, he is to "keep an 
eye on the main chance," as we say, "look out 
for number one," and let everybody else do 
likewise. This is a form of individualism, but 
not the only form. It is not the form which 
I have tried to recommend to your minds, not 
the form for which I plead this morning. True, 



274 THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 



individualism does indeed say to the govern- 
ment, Hands off; let me do as I like; but it 
immediately adds, Let me like to do to others 
as I would have them do to me; let me like to 
help bear another's burdens; let me like to 
love my neighbor as myself. 

Once more, then, as regards political theory, 
we may divide people into classes; there are 
the socialists; there are the individualists. 
The socialists believe in a good deal of gov- 
ernment, the individualists in but little. The 
socialists believe in centralizations, the indi- 
vidualists in local authority. The socialists 
say to the state, Take us under your care and 
direct our lives; the individualists say to the 
state, Hands off; laissez faire\ let us alone. 
Now, as a matter of fact, much of the social- 
ism of our day has been permeated with a spirit 
of fraternity, and people have come to think 
therefore that socialism necessarily means fra- 
ternity, and individualism non-fraternity A 
great mistake! Let us divide men into two 
classes, socialists and individualists. Let us 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 



275 



also divide them into two other classes, the 
fraternal and the unfraternal. Now the line 
that separates the fraternal from the unfraternal 
is not the same line that parts the socialists 
and individualists. The two lines may even 
cross at right angles. Bismarck, for instance, 
had no excess of sympathy or fraternity or un- 
selfishness about him. Yet under his leader- 
ship in Germany the government made consid- 
erable progress toward state socialism. There 
is fraternal socialism; also unfraternal social- 
ism. There is fraternal individualism; also un- 
fraternal individualism. I plead for the spirit 
that shall bid us say, Though no king com- 
mand us, though no government coerce us, 
though no majority attempt to make us, still, 
of our own freewill, do we consecrate ourselves 
to the service of our fellows: manfully will we 
seek to bear our own burdens; manfully too, 
will we seek to bear one another's burdens. 

Individualism, then, does not necessarily 
mean, true individualism necessarily does not 
mean isolation, True individualism does not 



276 THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 



mean that I shall go off all alone by myself. 
It does mean, indeed, that I shall have a right 
to if I want to; but it immediately adds that I 
am a great fool, or worse, if there can be any- 
thing worse than a fool, to want to. 

Constantine, it is said, once advised a dis- 
senting bishop, who could not get along with 
anybody else, to make a ladder and climb up 
to heaven by himself. True individualism has 
no ambition to go that way. It stands, I say, 
not for isolation but for co-operation, voluntary 
co-operation. A traveler in Japan relates that 
he was interviewed by a young woman of that 
country who was in a good deal of distress of 
mind over the subject of religion. The mis- 
sionaries had almost persuaded her to be a 
Christian; but she said, To become a Christian 
would be to turn my back on my father, and I 
owe my father all that I have and am. What 
shall I do? "I suppose," says the traveler, 
"that my answer was quite irregular, but I ad- 
vised her to stand by the old man." That is 
the spirit of true individualism— to stand by 
the old man. 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 277 



Go with the crowd, not always, but some- 
times. When crowds are rushing along in a 
selfish search for some outward satisfaction, 
then, even though I be constrained to follow 
them with my body, let me not tread in their 
footsteps. But if such a thing be conceivable 
as some of us used to be taught, that there is 
a broad road which leads down to death, and 
if by the divine decree the great majority of 
men have been doomed from the foundation of 
the world to go therein, while there is but a 
straight and narrow path that leads to life, and 
by the special favor of God I am one of the few 
permitted to find it, then may I have the Chris- 
tian grace to say, I will go with the crowd. 
Let their sorrow be my sorrow; in sympathy 
with their sorrow let me find my joy; there 
can be no other salvation for me. 

We are constantly coming back to that mag- 
nificent paradox of Jesus, "Whosoever would 
save his soul shall lose it." Only as one sinks 
his concern for himself in the love of humanity 
can he really rind his own life. 



278 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 



"Something the heart must have to cherish, 
Must love and joy and sorrow learn, 
Something with passion clasp, or perish, 
And in itself to ashes burn," 
Only as we help to bear one another's burdens 
can we truly bear our own. Says George Eliot 
in the "Spanish Gipsy," 

"No curse has fallen on us until we cease 
To help each other." 

How can we help each other? How can we 
bear one another's burdens? In many ways. 
But the one thing which I am specially desirous 
of making clear this morning, which I am 
bound iO repeat until it clings to everybody's 
memory, is that the true individualism which 
I advocate, does not mean isolation, but vol- 
untary co-operation, unconstrained mutual help- 
fulness. It is individualistic because the co- 
operation is voluntary, the mutual helpfulness 
unconstrained. 

How can we bear one another's burdens? 
For illustration I mention two ways. I take 
them because they are so simple and so sadly 
neglected. In the first place, we can refuse 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 279 

to repeat anything to another's discredit until 
we are sure that it is true. If I were to be 
guided in the selection of my topics by what 
seems to me in our everyday life most in need 
of reform, I should preach every week, or at 
least every other week, on gossip. The main 
thing that keeps me from devoting myself to 
such a course is that talking on the subject 
seems to have so little effect. The utter reck- 
lessness with which many of us pick up a re- 
port and proceed to spread it without stopping 
to inquire where it came from, or whether the 
man that originated it had any ground for it, 
is appalling. "I heard the report," you say, 
"and supposed, of course, that it was true, and 
so repeated it. " Supposed, of course, that it was 
true? Ah! Were you born yesterday? If not, 
if you have lived longer than a da}', and have 
kept your senses about you, then you must know 
that the mere fact of your having heard a re- 
port is no ground for supposing of course that 
it was true. Did you ever follow up a path 
issuing from a forest? It is so well beaten that 



280 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 



it must lead somewhere; there must be some- 
thing at the end of it. You go on; after a lit- 
tle it divides and as it divides each branch 
grows dimmer. At length it is with difficulty 
that you trace it among the leaves, until final- 
ly, it is nothing more than that famous squirrel 
track that ran up a tree, and the squirrel is not 
at home. I have sometimes set out with the 
intention of running down a remark, finding out 
who was originally responsible for it, and what 
he knew about it. For a little time it goes very 
well A remembers that B told him, and B 
that C told him, and C that D told him; but 
pretty soon the track divides and grows fainter, 
pretty soon I find some one who says, "I do not 
remember who told me, but it was common 
talk; I did not suppose that there was any 
doubt about it." I am up a tree again, and 
the squirrel is not at home. Somebody tells 
us something to a neighbor's discredit. Most 
of us do not stop to inquire whether this per- 
son had any means of knowing or not; we con- 
clude of course that it is so; but until we fol- 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 281 



low it up and find an intelligent and honest 
man who has had the means of directly know- 
ing about the matter, and tells us that he 
knows — until we do this, we have no logical 
ground for believing the report, and no right 
to repeat it. 

And even then — and this is another way in 
which we can help bear one another's burdens 
— let us remember that a man's best self, not 
his worst self, is his truest self. Would you 
and I be willing to be judged by those harsh 
standards that we apply to other people? The 
man who most closely analyses his own heart 
and life knows indeed that to err is human. The 
man in whose heart and life there is the largest 
measure of virtue and worth is surest that 
there must be some measure of virtue and worth 
in the hearts and lives of other people. Says 
Emerson, "Though we travel the world over to 
find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, 
or we find it not." And if we do carry it with 
us we shall be sure to find it. Did you ever 
hear it said of some one, as being a kind of in- 



282 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 



tellectual weakness, "He is so good himself 
that he thinks everybocty else must be." That 
is not so great delusion as you think. There 
is logic in it. We are all made out of the 
same rough stuff. We are children of a com- 
mon Father. I do not need to open a man's 
veins to assure myself that there is blood in 
them. There must be, for he is a man like me. 
It may not be excellent blood. It may need 
some purifier. But it is blood. It has in it 
the possibilities of life. So with my neigh- 
bor's soul. The elements of virtue are there, 
if I will but seek them. The)- are not super- 
ficial. Though undeveloped, they are the most 
fundamental facts of his being. When Raphael 
desired to paint the holy family, for a long 
time he strove in vain to put on canvas the 
idea that filled his soul. One morning while 
walking without the city meditating on his 
work, he saw sitting beneath a vine at her cot- 
tage door a peasant woman holding a boy in 
her arms, while another was leaning upon her 
knee. He had found his Madonna in real life 



THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 283 



We, too, can find ours there if we will but look 
— at least, the elements of a Madonna are in 
every mother's heart. 

And right here is the explanation of our so- 
cial problem, namely, in the undeveloped pos- 
sibilities of the human soul. Something is 
wrong. Well, must we then devise some new 
set of institutions, consecrate some new ma- 
chine? "Professor," someone inquired, "what 
is the difference, anyhow, between a fiddle and 
a violin?" "Ze deeferenz, " was the reply, "zat 
eggseests between ze veedlerand ze violinist." 
The millennium is to come not so much through 
producing a better machine as better men. 

A fond parent finally yielded to the solicita- 
tion of his boy and got him a wind-mill; but 
the lad was still unhappy. "Look here," said 
the father one day, in vexation on finding his 
boy in tears, "I got you the wind-mill, now 
.what do you want?" "I want — I want," the. 
poor fellow succeeded in sobbing, "I want the 
wind." 

Good institutions are well enough, in their 



284 THE TRUE INDIVIDUALISM 



way, but in themselves they count for but lit- 
tle. They need the wind. Let there breathe 
from the soul a spirit of mutual helpfulness, 
and even poor institutions will work fairly 
well. Without this spirit the best are of but 
little value. "Marvel not that I say unto thee, 
Thou must be born anew?" The calling out 
into a fresh and vigorous life of that unselfish- 
ness with the germs of which every human soul 
is endowed, this is the remedy for our social 
ills. This is the true individualism for which 
I plead. More and more may we learn in a 
large and liberal way to bear one another's 
burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. 



IMMORTALITY. 



Job, xiv: 14. "If a man die, shall he live again?" 

Thus asked the skeptical author of the book of 
Job some 2, 500 years ago. We have not reached 
a positive solution of the problem since. The 
only movement, in fact, which in our day has 
given promises of shedding the light of scientific 
demonstration upon this question is Spiritual- 
ism, and Spiritualism has not succeeded. I do 
not mean to say that it has been proven to be 
a delusion or that it has failed to carry convic- 
tion to many thoughtful minds. Those minds 
have been numerous and have included men of 
scientific eminence like, for instance, the justly 
celebrated Prof. Alfred R. Wallace, who di- 
vides with the late Charles Darwin the honor 
of developing that theory of evolution which 
goes by Mr. Darwin's name. But Spiritual- 
ism has not yet been able to come before the 
285 



286 



IMMORTALITY 



world and after the manner of the scientist 
demonstrate her propositions by such proofs as 
no sane mind can reject. 

The only substantial contribution to this 
problem which the scientific thought of our 
generation has made, has been in the line of 
demonstrating the immortality of the race. 

Perhaps the most brilliant intellectual achieve- 
ment of the present century has been the dem- 
onstration of two principles which are now an 
accepted part of established truth — the inde- 
structibleness of matter, and the conservation 
of energy, or what Herbert Spencer prefers to 
call the persistence of force. 

We used to think of matter as capable of 
being made out of nothing and reduced to 
nothing, created and annihilated. Somewhere 
in the dim past, at the fiat of Jehovah, the 
world was made; somewhere in the not very 
remote future, at the fiat of Jehovah, the world 
was to be destroyed. Such notions as these 
are no longer entertained by well-informed 
minds. Matter, though continually changing 



IMMORTALITY 



287 



its form, never ceases to be. The quantity 
remains constant, neither increased nor dimin- 
ished. 

So, too, with force. The moving cannon 
ball strikes, we will say, a wall of rock and 
drops motionless to the ground. The force 
with which just before it was whirled through 
the air seems lost. Not so. It has only changed 
its form. A portion has been converted into 
heat imparted to the ball and the rock. A por- 
tion has been converted into the light which 
momentarily flashed forth when the ball met 
the intercepting ledge and, as we say, struck 
fire. We might never be able to gather up 
again these scattered fragments of force and 
recombine them in the form in which they 
originally existed as the momentum of the can- 
non ball; but however minutely subdivided, 
it remains in the aggregate undiminished. This 
fact is, as I have said, expressed in the doc- 
trine commonly called the conservation, that 
is, the preservation, of energy, or what Herbert 
Spencer prefers to call, the persistence of force. 



288 



IMMORTALITY 



Now these principles, we have reason to be- 
lieve, are just as applicable to social as to 
what we call material forces and essences. No 
effort put forth by you or me in behalf of hu- 
manity, however much it may change form or 
direction, can ever be lost. No noble trait of 
character which you or I develop and display 
can ever cease to be. Mind is as indestructi- 
ble as matter. The eternal economy of things 
as infallibly guarantees the conservation of he- 
roism as of heat. 

These principles, the indestructibleness of 
matter and the conservation of energy, trans- 
lated into terms of human life, give us in some 
form the immortality of the soul. They give 
us at any rate what I called the immortality of 
the race. This is the thought which lies at 
the foundation of the religious phase of Posi- 
tivism, the so-called Religion of Humanity, 
the religion founded by the Frenchman, Auguste 
Comte, and represented in our day, for exam- 
ple, by the English essayist, Frederic Har- 
rison, and the poet and novelist, George Eliot. 



IMMORTALITY 



289 



That noble woman put the thought into those 

familiar lines: 

"Oh, may I join the choir invisible 
Of those immortal dead who live again 
In minds made better by their presence: live 
In pulses stirred to generosity, 
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
Of miserable aims that end with self,, 
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 
And with their mild persistence urge man's search 
To vaster issues. 

So to live is heaven." 

We may well bestow our most profound ad- 
miration upon the answer of the Positivist to 
the question— "If a man die, shall he live 
again?" Self-surrender could go no farther 
than this willingness to lose, to merge one's 
own individuality in the race, to live and labor 
not that one may enjoy a personal reward or 
even a continuance of one's personal life but 
that the interests of humanity may be advanced. 
Self-surrender, I say, could go no farther than 
this, and what virtue more exalted than self- 
surrender? 

But we must be on our guard against drawing 
from these statements an inference for which 



290 



IMMORTALITY 



they furnish no warrant, against converting the 
truth that the most sublime virtue is to be 
found in a philanthropic forgetfulness of self 
into an affirmation that there is to be no to- 
morrow for the self-forgetting soul. The most 
thorough-going display of patriotism is to be 
found in laying down one's life for his country,- 
but it does not follow from this fact that we 
are all to perish at the cannon's mouth. What 
is needed is not that we all should die, but 
that we all should be willing to die, for our 
country. The most exalted virtue is to be 
found in devoting one's self to the service of 
humanity without any thought of living again 
after this life is over; but it does not follow 
from this fact that for you and me as individ- 
uals death does end all. What is needed is 
not that we all should be mortal but that we 
so far forget ourselves as to be willing to be 
mortal. 

Moreover while we may, while I confidently 
believe that we eventually shall, rise to such a 
plane of moral development as will enable us 



IMMORTALITY 



291 



to live the most virtuous, self-denying lives in 
this world without any thought of a world to 
come, still I feel the force of the argument 
that meantime we may need the aid of those 
lower motives which are grounded in an expec- 
tation of personal continuance and personal re- 
ward. I ought to plow and sow to-day that I 
may help feed other mouths than mine, even 
were I assured in advance that I am not to 
live till the harvest time. Most of us, I am 
sure, are capable of that degree of self-sacrifice, 
and in fact, are so living every day; but it is 
possible that some of us need the additional 
spur of looking forward to a chance to partic- 
ipate ourselves in the fruit of our labor. 

This thought brings us to dangerous ground. 
There is a very strong temptation to advocate 
a belief that we think will be beneficial to the 
world even if we do not find really adequate 
grounds for its support. There is a strong 
temptation to describe with some show of con- 
fidence, the streets of the New Jerusalem, for 
the sake of stimulating men to purer living 



292 



IMMORTALITY 



even though in our inmost minds we find scant 
ground for believing in the existence of the 
golden city. I realize that this temptation is 
specially strong with those who stand before 
the community in the professional capacity in 
which I stand before you to-day. But, my 
friends, I have too much faith in you to fancy 
that I need to be uncandid in your presence 
I have too much faith in humanity to think 
that for our highest development we need to 
be lured with lies. I have too much faith in 
the truth to think that this grand food of the 
human mind needs to be supplemented with 
a tonic of delusions. 

Do you now ask me whether I expect on the 
morning after I surrender this physical frame 
of mine to awake to the consciousness that I 
am I, that I have lived in the past, that I am 
to live forever? I have simply to reply that I 
do not know. I do not know that I have much 
more reason to affirm than to deny, as I am 
confident that I have no more reason to deny 
than to affirm. If to-morrow bring to me some 



IMMORTALITY 



293 



light that I do not now possess, whichever 
answer that new light may dictate, I trust 
that I shall not hesitate to accept it as frankly 
as I confess my ignorance today. As yet the 
question seems to me unanswered. The prob- 
lem, not dark, but simply unsolved. 

But while I would scrupulously refrain from 
asserting a belief about which there still lin- 
gered so much uncertainty, let me re-avow a 
belief which has taken so firm a hold on my 
convictions as to drive away all doubt. The 
exact form in which the human soul is to real- 
ize its promised future it has not yet been 
given to us to know ; but that there exists at th e 
centre of the universe and permeates it to its 
remotest bound a Power which will bring that 
promise to its full fruition seems to my mind 
a truth beyond all question. The course of 
history and the experience of my inmost soul 
alike reassure me as to the essential sanity of 
the universe, the exalted significance of human 
life. 

This conviction, I know, demands that one 



294 



IMMORTALITY 



should seem to ignore at times the apparent 
tendencies of things ; but only because those 
tendencies are swallowed up in the sweep of 
a still wider tendency, because they are curves 
in the spiral which on the whole is straight, 
bends in the road, which, in spite of the tem- 
porary windings is still steadily leading on to 
Albany or Boston or New York. 

I have often wondered what would be my 
conclusions, had there been given me the power 
to reflect on the course of things while per- 
mitted to live through the round of but a sin- 
gle year, and to know nothing of what had 
preceded or what was to follow. 

Springtime comes with bud and blossom ; the 
forests put on their summer glories; autumn 
drops her ripe fruits into my lap But alas! 
winter comes and undoes the labor of the year. 
The withered leaves are scattered ruthlessly 
abroad: the boughs are bare again; all that 
has been delighting my eye has gone for 
nought. "God has forgotten the world." 

But the longer view which we are permitted 



IMMORTALITY 



295 



to take reveals the fact that this c} T cle of the 
seasons is but a step in the progress of life 
which is making the wilderness to blossom as 
the rose ; one curve in the spiral which repre- 
sents the larger trend of things. 

Or again, we will suppose that it is my priv- 
ilege to witness from year to 5^ear the career of 
the oak as it annually clothes itself with ver- 
dure and then unclothes itself again. At last 
death assails not only the transitory leaves 
but also the abiding trunk itself. Decay in- 
vades its branches and pitilessly advances to 
its very roots. It crumbles to the ground. 
Surely God has at last forgotten the world. 

But the still longer view which we are per- 
mitted to take reveals the fact that like the 
other this new cycle of birth and death is but 
a step in that larger evolution of life through 
which higher and higher forms are making 
their appearance and God's remembrance of 
the world continually manifesting itself. 

The brink of the grave, as we are in the habit 
of saying (though I hate the phrase, let us 



296 



IMMORTALITY 



rather say the portal of the grave), brings us to 
the end of another cycle, another round of 
activity, the sequel to which we are not yet 
permitted clearly to see. But to believe that 
this portal does not introduce us to a future 
that is worthy of bur past, is to ignore the 
teachings of what does fall within the range of 
our experience. It is to fancy that the spiral 
has abruptly come to an end because one curve 
has at last got beyond the reach of our vision ; 
that the road finally leads nowhere because at 
the distant horizon it sweeps around a mount- 
ain beyond which we have not yet traveled. 
It is to suppose that that conservation of en- 
ergy of which I have spoken stops short with 
that energy most of all worth conserving, the 
energy manifested in human character and life. 

For we may feel sure that in the eternal 
economy of God no precious bit of human na- 
ture can ever be lost; that the Power which, 
somehow and somewhere, conserves the mo- 
mentum of the cannon ball, will not squander 
its highest product. Does the force which the 



IMMORTALITY 



297 



leaves and buds are to-day displaying still, some- 
how and somewhere, persist? Then we may 
feel sure that somehow and somewhere, though 
it be not yet revealed to us how or where, still 
at the fittest time and in the fullest measure 
will that highest of all forces, the force which 
manifests itself in human personality, persist. 

I have no doubt that to some of us all this 
will seem unsatisfactorily vague; that it will 
be thought a sorry substitute for those definite 
pictures of a future life in which we have been 
in the habit of letting our imaginations revel. 

In reply to this there occur to me in closing 
two reflections. 

First, however the future is to shape itself, 
the duty of the present is unmistakable. If we 
are not to carry our self-conscious personality 
into another life than this, but are to lose our 
individuality in the race, then self-interest as 
well as duty demands that we spend the three 
score and ten years allotted us in accomplish- 
ing the most possible for ourselves and hu- 
manity. And this result can be secured only 



293 



IMMORTALITY 



by the cheerful devotion of our powers to the 
service of humanity. If we are to carry our 
self-conscious personality into another life 
than this, then it is our duty and ought to be 
our delight to develop a personal character 
worth carrying. And such a character can be 
attained only through the cheerful devotion of 
our powers to the service of humanity. In the 
language of Jesus which I am fond of quoting, 
"Whosoever shall seek to gain his life shall 
lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life shall 
preserve it." 

But in the second place, so far from this 
attitude of uncertainty being an unwelcome 
necessity to which our inevitable ignorance 
consigns us, it is to my thinking preemi- 
nently religious. One of the essentials of 
religion is trust — a trust which laying hold of 
the fundamental goodness of the Eternal, pro- 
jects faith beyond the limits of sight, rests 
content to cheerfully face one's present duty 
while ignorant of some of the details in the 
economy of God, because of the abiding assur 



IMMORTALITY 



299 



ance that in his own good way and time all 
will be well. 

Without fear and without reserve, it may be 
in the darkness and from the topmost stair, at 
the invitation of his voice, the trustful child 
tosses herself forward into her father' s embrace 
assured of the strength of his arms and the 
genuineness of his love. 

'''Give me. Jehovah, some dehnite pledge 
respecting the details of the life beyond the 
grave, or I falter and faint." says that mis- 
called faith which is the very soul of doubt. 
"I cannot walk at all, unless I walk by sight." 

"The future. Father, be in thy mind, as it 
is in thy hand," says that miscalled doubt 
which is the very soul of faith. "But teach me 
the task of to-day. and for the outcome of my 
efforts. I cheerfully await the slow develop- 
ment of thy eternal purpose." 

1 1 only know 
My present duty, and my Lord's command 
To occupy till he comes. So at the post 
Where he hath set me in his providence 
I choose for one to meet him face to face, 



300 



IMMORTALITY 



No faithless servant, frightened from my task, 
But ready when the Lord of the harvest calls; 
And therefore with ail reverence, I would say, 
'Let God do his work, we will see to ours. 
Bring in the candles. " 

I would that we might emulate the faith of 
Abraham Davenport; that we might attain a 
faith grounded in reason, indeed, and so thor- 
oughly grounded that we shall cease to fever- 
ishly covet a knowledge not required for the 
labors of to-day; a faith that shall even count 
it a privilege to trust to the eternal Trust- 
worthiness those details of life and death which 
we do not now need to know. 

"The fool asks 'with what flesh? in joy or pain? 
Helped or unhelped? and lonely, or again 

Surrounded by our earthly friends?' 
I know not, and glory that I do 
Not know; that for eternity's great ends 
God counted me as worthy of such trust 

That I need not be told." 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



Matthew xvi, 26: "For what shall a man be profited 
if he shall gain the whole world and forfeit his life." 

Or in the more familiar language of King 
James' version: 

"For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole 
world and lose his own soul." 

We talk about a man's losing his soul as 
though it were something that had no vital, 
inseparable connection with him, something 
that he can carry about in his pocket like a 
jack-knife, or at any rate that can be easily 
detached; a thing that is fastened as it were 
on the outside, just, you know, as some people 
are said to wear their hearts on their sleeves. 

This odd phrase, "losing one's soul," has an 

interesting ancestry. It is an illustration of 

those numerous expressions and customs which 

abound in our lives, though their original sig- 
301 



302 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



nificance has been largely forgotten. For ex- 
ample, some of us were taught in our child- 
hood that it is a special sin to hurt a robin, 
and we fancied in a sort of vague way that 
there was something peculiarly virtuous about 
that bird. Yet he is a famous glutton and 
thief. Our special regard for him is a tradi- 
tion handed down from the time long since 
passed when he was sacred to the patron God 
of Thursday, the old Scandinavian deity Thor. 
We have preserved the belief in the robin's 
sacredness but forgotten the notion out of 
which that sacredness grew. So it is with the 
phrase "losing one's soul." 

Chamisso, a German poet who flourished 
early in the present century, wrote a little 
story in which the hero, Peter Schlemihl, had 
the misfortune to lose his own shadow. A 
whimsical fancy it seems to us, but we find it 
repeatedly appearing in the old-time myths. 
One of Hans Andersen's fairy tales relates 
that a man was punished by being robbed of 
his shadow. Lowell tells us that in the litera- 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



HU3 



ture of witchcraft it is reported that the devil 
once opened a school of magic in Toledo, a 
city of Spain. The ceremony of graduation 
in this institution was peculiar. The senior 
class had all to run through a narrow cavern 
and the venerable president was entitled to the 
hindmost if he could catch him. (The origin, 
by the by, of the saying, "The devil take the 
hindmost.") Somtimes, however, it happened 
that he caught only his shadow, and in that 
case the man who was so nimble as to beat 
the devil and leave nothing but his shadow in 
his pursuer's hands, was esteemed especially 
fortunate ; he became the most renowned ma- 
gician of his year. 

It seems very strange to us that there ever 
was a time when people did not understand 
what a shadow really was, but it takes a great 
while to discover the simplest truths. In olden 
times the nature of light was a mystery and 
not understanding the nature of light they 
could not understand the relation between the 
sun and a man's shadow. What they noticed 



304 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



was the connection of the shadow, not with the 
sun, but with the man. and its connection with 
him was so close that they thought of it as 
in a sense a part of him. As, however, the 
shadow was frequently disappearing, they con- 
ceived of it as something which could be de- 
tached from him, as from Peter Schlemihl or 
from the character in Hans Anderson's 
fairy tale. To be permanently robbed of it 
was a great loss; it was so much subtraction 
from one's personality and force. 

This same notion appears to-day in many 
rude tribes. Travelers tell us that savages 
often object to being photographed. They 
think that there is a personal loss involved in 
the process. To take a man's picture (we 
have a survival of the same thought apparently 
in the word "take") is, in their thought, to peel 
off, as it were, a layer from himself, to make 
him so much Jess of a man. 

Again, the reflection of himself which the 
primitive man saw in the river or lake, he 
thought of as related to his body very much 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



305 



like the shadow. Children and untutored peo- 
ple now, you know, talk about seeing their 
shadows in the water. 

In ways like this, primitive men came to be- 
lieve in the existence of a sort of counterpart 
of the body, ordinarily connected with it, but 
capable of temporarily or permanently with- 
drawing from it. This was the man's second 
self, or as it was sometimes called, his double. 
It was this second self that wandered about in 
dreams, and saw and heard and did various 
things, while the body slept. The dream was 
supposed to be not a mere creature of the im- 
agination, but an actual occurrence. Also it 
was this second self that was concerned in cat- 
alepsy and ecstasy and various forms of trance 
It was this second self that left the body at 
death. Some of you have seen in ancient Scrip- 
tures or other religious books, pictures of 
death-bed scenes in which a baby-like image, 
a miniature copy of the man, is represented as 
escaping from his mouth. This was the second 
self, the soul. We have perpetuated in our 



306 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



modern speech this relation of the body with 
the soul. Believers in ghosts talk about a 
dead man's "shade" coming back to earth. 

Now it is the notion of this double, this 
second self, something that is really part of a 
man and still capable of being temporarily or 
permanently separated from him, it is this 
notion that we have preserved in our curious 
phrase, losing one's soul. 

Retzsch, the German painter, has given us 
a famous picture of the devil playing chess 
with a man, who had wagered his soul against 
some price from the adversary of souls. Thus 
we say a man may lose his soul to Satan or 
give it to God. 

But the same advance in human thought 
which is leading us to recognize the oneness 
of the universe is leading us also to recognize 
the oneness of the individual. Man, like the 
world, is not dual. He is one. Your soul is 
not your double. It is yourself, your charac- 
ter, your inner and most vital life. "Now, 
Gilbert," said the doctor who had been sum- 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



307 



moned to the bedside of a little sick lad, "now, 
Gilbert, put your tongue out." The poor lad 
made an effort and at last succeeded in feebly 
protruding the tip of his tongue. "No, no," 
said the doctor, impatiently, "put it right out. 
The little fellow shook his head, his eyes filled 
with tears, and he answered, "I can't, doctor, 
it is fastened on to me." It is so with my 
soul, inseparably fastened to me; for it is my- 
self. We frequently exclaim with satisfaction 
on arriving at our journey's end, "Here we are 
'at last." But I am always here. I never can 
be there. By no possibility can I escape from 
myself. There was genuine philosophy in the 
red man's answer when he had missed his way 
and was told he was lost. "No, Indian not 
lost; wigwam lost; Indian here." I can never 
lose, I can never part completely with, my 
soul. Whatever I am, such is my soul. Am 
I filled with devotion to virtue and truth? 
Saved then is my soul. No external power 
can damn it. Am I filled with devotion to 
error and vice? Damned then is my soul. No 



308 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



external power can save it. The delusion that, 
by some magic out of a rotten life an uncon- 
taminated soul can be evoked and carried up 
to a heaven of bliss — this delusion must go the 
way of a belief in the reality of dreams and 
the independent existence of shadows, and all 
the other outgrown notions about the second 
self. 

But, says some one, though the Indian can- 
not lose himself, he may lose his wigwam and 
be made very uncomfortable in consequence. 
It is of course, conceivable that a good man 
may be arbitrarily thrust out of some palace 
and into some dungeon. We know that such 
wrongs have been too often committed in this 
life. Possibly they may be done in a life to 
come. But that dungeon into which it is con- 
ceivable that a good man may be artificially 
thrust, will not be hell. For there can be no 
hell without remorse; and remorse the man of 
upright deeds and pure desires can never know. 

I am not disparaging the importance of one's 
surroundings. I like to be comfortable; but 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



309 



if I must choose between a cheerful fire while 
iuy heart is cold with selfishness, and a cheerless 
fireside while my heart is warm with love for 
my fellow-men, may I have the grace to say, 
"Let the fire die out on the hearthstone that 
it may live in my soul." Must I choose be- 
tween a so-called heaven where hearts are so 
shriveled with absorption in a desire for their 
own salvation, that they are happy though 
their friends are in torment, and a so-called 
hell where hearts are large with that love which 
consists in the leaving out of self ? May I have 
the penetration to see that such a heaven is 
the devil's kingdom while God is enthroned in 
what men miscall hell. I may have quoted 
before some one's remark, that as between the 
traditional hell and the traditional heaven, 
heaven has the advantage as regards climate, 
but hell as regards society. 

Vishnu asked Bal, runs an old Hindoo 
Scripture, to take his choice 

With five wise men to visit hell, 
Or with five ignorant to visit Heaven, 



310 



LOSIXG ONE'S SOUL 



Then quick in heart did Bal rejoice 

And chose in hell with the wise to dwell. 

For heaven is hell with follies full 

And hell is heaven with wisdom's leaven." 

More important, however, not only than 
one's physical surroundings but also than his 
society is the man himself. "The reward of a 
thing well done is to have done it." The in- 
ternal satisfaction and strength which comes 
from doing the right and living the pure is a 
reward that we can never miss. In the eternal 
economy of things we may feel sure that the 
soul which thus lives and loves will eventually 
create for itself a home in harmony with its 
own inner spirit, just as the growing nautilus 
expanding from year to year builds for itself 
each new chamber larger than the last. There 
is found on the sea shore a familiar animal 
called the hermit crab. Long ago some ances- 
tor sought to protect itself by crawling into 
the cast off shell of some dead mollusk, per- 
haps a periwinkle or whelk. The policy proved 
popular; it was followed by his descendants, 
until at last, depending through many genera- 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



311 



tions for protection upon some other animal's 
abandoned shell, the hermit crab lost the power 
to secrete one of its own, and now if expelled 
from its stolen house its bod}' is left defense- 
less. Thus it turns out with us when we seek 
salvation by crawling into another's virtue, 
when we seek it from some other source than 
ourselves, when we seek happiness, not from 
within but from without. We may get some 
passing comfort, but the purchase-price is the 
steadily increasing flabbiness of our manhood. 
The only real heaven is that which grows 
around and out of the inner life. "Heaven 
is his whose way is upright," 

"Doing all the good he can 

Pure in heart and self-denying 
Loving God and fellow-man." 

To lose one's soul, in the only sense in 
which that phrase can have any real meaning, 
is then to lose one's self, and to lose one's self 
is to sacrifice those high qualities of mind and 
heart which are our birthright. 

We begin to lose our souls when we delib- 
erately feed our minds on error. Have you 



312 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



ever heard a man say, "If my present belief is 
false, I never want to know it ; let me keep 
on cherishing so pleasant a faith, even though 
it may prove to be without any solid founda- 
tion. " Thus the test by which one decides to 
accept or reject a doctrine is not the question, 
"Is it true?" but "Is it pleasant?" Not, "Does 
it commend itself to my reason?" but, "Will 
it increase my comfort?" But the mind can 
have growth only when fed on truth. So the 
soul which seeks to escape being buffeted by 
the waves of unfettered thinking, through tak- 
ing refuge in the shell of some dead creed, 
soon, like the hermit-crab, finds the tissues 
of its manly independence turning into jelly. 
If you would not lose your soul do not shrink 
in alarm from any truth which the full light of 
day can reveal. 

"Fear's a large promiser. They who subject live 
To that base passion, know not what they give." 

This fear sometimes takes a special form 
with which I presume we are all familiar. My 
neighbor says to me, "A man can be saved only 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



313 



by professing faith in the blood of Christ." I 
say, "A man can be saved only by attaining a 
noble character." He answers, "I believe in 
attaining a noble character, too, and so the 
safe policy is both to attain the noble charac- 
ter and profess faith in the blood. Then which- 
ever of our opinions turns out to be correct, 
I shall be right either way. But suppose my 
opinion turns out to be correct, where will you 
be?" Now the fallacy of this lies in supposing 
that a man can attain a noble character and 
still profess belief in anything he does not 
really believe. Just so soon as a man begins 
to take on his lips a confession of faith that 
does not represent a genuine conviction in his 
brain, just so soon does he begin to disinteg- 
rate his character. Let him keep on in this 
policy and he may be saved, we will say in an- 
other life, whatever there is left of him; but 
there will not be much left. Wherever he 
goes, his soul is that intellectual and moral 
vacuity which this life left in him. Wherever he 
goes, as a force in the universe, his soul is lost. 



314 



LOSISG OSES SOUL 



To attempt to escape hell by saying. "I be- 
lieve." when I do not really believe, is to start 
a hell in my soul here, in order to save my 
soul from being cast into hell hereafter. To 
attempt to escape hell by saying. "I believe," 
when I do not really believe, is to seek to avoid 
death by committing suicide. 

"A savings bank," says Pat. "is a place 
where you can put your money in to-day and 
get it out to-morrow by giving a fortnight's 
notice." So will it be with us when we seek 
to insure for ourselves a store of bliss in life's 
eternal morrow, by cloaking ourselves in error 
to-day. .Law is nowhere more invariable than 
in the mathematics of the soul. So when that 
great morrow comes we shall find that we have 
invested but a fragment of character, and on 
a plan that defies all possibility of redemption. 

Again we begin to lose our souls whenever 
we begin to feed our hearts on vice. Accord- 
ing to the doctrine of evolution, the life of man 
was evolved by just such processes as those 
which have brought into existence the life of 
the lower animal world. 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



315 



"What," says some one in alarm, "shall we 
perish as beasts perish?" "Yes," is the true 
reply, "yes, if we are beasts. " The only way 
to escape the beast's fate is to rise above the 
beastly nature. 

"Why do you always take an upper berth on 
the steamer, Chollie. " "So that I shall be up 
out of the wet if she sinks, you know. " Thus 
we seek to get to heaven by crawling up on a 
bed prepared for us by other hands, and so 
being carried into bliss. But when the storm 
rolls over us we must sink or swim. It is not 
where we are but what we are on which our 
fate depends. 

Let us take home two admonitions: First, 
fret not about the future. Sufficient unto the 
hour is the duty thereof. 

"One day at a time; 'tis the whole of life." 

Attend to the work of to-day., the work of 
this life, and your fate on the morrow, your 
fate in another life, need give you no concern. 

"For faith and truth and mighty love 
Which from the God-head flow, 



316 



LOSING ONE'S SOUL 



Show us the life of heaven above 
Springs from the life below." 

Again, fret not about yourself. "We are 
wrong always when we think too much of what 
we think or are. " Seek to save yourself by 
forgetting yourself in the effort to help save 
your fellows. 

Clarkson, the famous English philanthropist, 
was once asked if he thought about the wel- 
fare of his own soul. "My own soul?" was his 
reply, "Bless my soul! I forgot that I had 
one." May you and I grow more and more 
into that saving forgetfulness. Forgetful of 
our welfare on the morrow, may we become 
thoroughly absorbed in the service of to-day, 
the service of humanity. 



C 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 

Emerson's Essays, First series: "Beware of too much 
good staying in your hands." 

How much does he get? That is the univer- 
sal question. John graduates from college or 
from high school and leaves home "to seek his 
fortune" as we say. I meet his father a year 
after. "What is the news from John?" I ask. 
"He is doing nicely." And then, as though 
that were a complete explanation of the state- 
ment that he is doing nicely, the father tells 
me how much John gets. 

Even the ministry is not exempt from the 
application of this touchstone. We do find 
refreshing illustrations of the fact that clergy- 
men in deciding on the relative "loudness" of 
two rival calls, may be influenced by other con- 
siderations than money. But I notice that 

even with the cloth, the question how Rev- 

317 



318 



HO IV MUCH DOES HE GET? 



erend So-and-So is doing, though it usually 
means more, is also understood at least t o 
include the inquiry, "How much does he get? 

Perhaps we have the most striking recogni- 
tion of pecuniary compensation as a standard 
of success, in the case of politics. I have often 
wondered over the eagerness for political office. 
It is easy to see why a man should like to be 
president, or governor, or mayor. An office of 
that kind carries with it a certain distinction 
that may well attract an ambitious mind. But 
almost every kind of political office is sought 
nearly as greedily. 

Among the curious old editions of the Chris- 
tian Scriptures there was one that went by the 
name of the Place-makers Bible. It got its 
name from the translation of the ninth verse 
of the fifth chapter of Matthew. "Blessed are 
the place-makers for they shall be called the 
children of God. " Blessed are the place-makers! 
It is a very widely-accepted beatitude. It has 
been said that he is a public benefactor who 
makes two blades of grass grow where but one 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 



319 



grew before. And he is thought to have de- 
served about as well from the needy world who 
makes two government offices where there was 
but one before. 

Now what is the explanation of this eager- 
ness to serve the State, not, I say, merely in the 
Presidency, or a Governorship, or Mayoral- 
ty, but in a cross-roads postoffice or a depart- 
ment clerkship, or even perhaps as the custo- 
dian of a government scrubbing brush or 
broom? There is no particular distinction in 
such places and men are not, as a rule, greedy 
for work. I know, of course, that in the bus- 
iness changes that occasionally occur, industri- 
ous people are thrown out of employment, and 
so are really anxious for a chance to do some- 
thing. But on the whole, the opportunity to 
labor is a drug in the market. The average 
man can find a good deal of satisfaction in 
loafing. We seldom see people tossing their 
caps in the air, or shouting themselves hoarse, 
over the fact that somebody has got a chance 
to trundle a wheelbarrow or carry brick and 



320 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 



mortar for a private employer, or even bend all 
day over a merchant's ledger. But the man 
is thought specially fortunate who has been 
favored with a position in the service of the 
State. Why? Pretty clearly because a political 
office is commonly, though often mistakenly, 
supposed to mean what I have heard called, 
though you may not be familiar with the lan- 
guage — -"a soft snap." I say that this is often 
a mistaken supposition. Do you remember the 
etymology of the word salary? It comes from 
the same root as saline, that is, from sal which 
is Latin for salt. I have known even of gov- 
ernment salaries which were not sufficient to 
provide much more than this particular item 
in a man's bill of fare. But there is a certain 
vague feeling that when one is in the employ 
of the State one is in pretty close contact with 
an enormous source of wealth, and so will not 
have to work very hard for one's wages. A 
government position is thus expected to offer 
a satisfactory answer to the question, "How 
much does he get?" 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 



321 



My friends, I plead to-day for a different 
standard. The true test of a man's success is 
not the question "How much does he get?" 
but "How much does he give?" Did you ever 
hear it said of some one, "He is in luck, he 
gets a thousand or fifteen hundred or two thous- 
and dollars a year and hardly anything to do?" 
Perhaps it is added, "He goes to the office 
every morning, but usually is not required to 
stay more than an hour or two, and so he has 
the rest of the day to himself." In luck, yes; 
but there are two kinds of luck. He is in luck; 
but in tremendously ill luck. In sack-cloth 
and ashes, if need be, let him implore heaven 
to rid him of this curse of being compelled to 
get more than he gives! 

The Greeks had a very suggestive legend 
about Polycrates. He was king of the island 
of Samos. For many years he was renowned 
for the steady course of his good fortune. Un- 
varying success attended him in war. Wealth 
flowed in upon him in streams. There was no 
end to his prosperity. His friend and ally 



322 HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 

Amasis, King of Egypt, realizing that Poly- 
crates was running up a bill with Fate that 
some day he must pay with heavy interest, 
advised him to forestall, if possible, this inev- 
itable payment by giving up some precious 
possession. And so Polycrates threw into the 
sea a beautiful ring, the most valuable of his 
gems. Some days afterward there was brought 
him for the royal table a fine fish just taken 
from the water. What was Polycrates' con- 
sternation when in the stomach of the fish was 
found his own jewelled ring, thrust back upon 
him in spite of his efforts to get rid of it! But 
Nemesis, the avenging deity that in the old 
Greek thought presided over human life, did 
not forget. Polycrates paid at last the penalty 
of his long prosperity. He met a shameful 
death upon the cross. 

There are two errors in this old Greek m5 T th. 
It will do no good to throw your wealth into 
the sea. What Providence demands is not 
penance but philanthropy; not that you shall 
rob yourself of your resources, but that you 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 



323 



shall use them for the benefit of your fellows. 
Secondly, the Greeks, like the ancient Jews, 
to whose mistake I have frequently referred, 
were in error In supposing that selfishness 
is always punished with outward ill-fortune. 
It often is. The villain whose hand is against 
every man is likely sooner or later to find to 
his cost the hand of every man against him. 
Dishonesty does not, as a rule, pay very well in 
the long run. It does sometimes, however, as 
regards mere outward well-being. The man who 
has given his life to so-called sharp practices, 
to schemes of selfish satisfaction, sometimes 
dies rich. Rich, that is, in land and stocks; 
pitifully poverty-stricken in soul. It is in the 
heart, in the shriveling of those qualities of 
character which alone can make life worth 
living, that retribution never faileth. 

But along with these errors there was a great 
truth in the old Greek myth of Polycrates. 
This, namely, that he who is always receiving 
more than his deserts is becoming most ap- 
pallingly in debt to the universe. The man 



324 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 



who keeps on getting more than he gives is 
under the curse of God. 

An African chief, it is said, once gave the 
following definitions of right and wrong — "Right 
is when I take away my neighbor's cattle; 
wrong is when he takes away mine." 

We smile at the barbarian's crude ideals 
or his frankness in confessing them. But what 
other standard am I recognizing when I scour 
the country in search of an easy job with a fat 
salary appended? What am I doing but taking 
my neighbor's cattle when I seek to get from 
the world more than I give? 

The man who willingly receives or retains a 
political office, wherein, to his knowledge, 
there is paid a greater compensation than the 
services are worth, is a thief. He is taking 
your wealth and mine for his personal profit. 

How is Reverend Mr. So-and-So getting on? 
Don't think the size of his salary answers the 
question. Tell me rather, if you choose to 
phrase it so, how many souls he is saving; 
how many lives he is helping to make hap- 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 



325 



pier; how much healthier in body and keener 
in brain and purer in heart the people are as 
a consequence of his preaching or his practice. 

Why, John, do you mean to say that you 
have found an easy place where you don't have 
much to do and get well paid for it? Then 
may God have mercy on your little soul! 

Let us rather thank heaven for the hard 
places. We can never too deeply lay to our 
hearts the truth that it is just as shameful to 
seek to get from society more than we give, as 
to weigh out to your customer fourteen ounces 
of sugar and charge him the price of a pound. 
Xo — the test of success is not. How much does 
he get? but. How much does he give? 

Do not think that I am manufacturing sen- 
timent, or talking about merely imaginary 
cases. Xo. I am speaking out of the experience 
of my heart. Many a time have I reviewed 
the day's work in the schoolroom or the Teach- 
er's Institute with a painful suspicion that the 
State of Wisconsin had been giving me for 
that day's work more than value received. And 



326 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 



many a time since I entered your service has 
the inquiry arisen in my mind, and not been 
answered in a very reassuring fashion, "What 
has there been in my sermon to justify the out- 
lay in my behalf? What has there been in the 
work of the week that can ease my conscience 
for having been housed in a more beautiful 
study than enjoyed by any other minister in 
America, and having been paid my salary with 
a promptness that is unique in all my experi- 
ence of church finances?" I am not now lay- 
ing claim to any special virtue in the matter. 
I cannot say that I ever offered to pay back to 
you or the State any part of my wages or sal- 
ary ; but I at least have had a high ideal in 
the case, I at least have resolved on trying 
to avoid the experience of feeling again, that 
I had been getting more than I had given. 

Most of us in our childhood— and sometimes 
childhood lasts a good many years — or in early 
life at any rate, rather enjoyed having people 
understand that we did our work without much 
preparation. We got our lessons easily, If 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 



327 



congratulated on our success in making a 
speech, for instance, we liked to be able to 
say, "Oh, I thank you; that was on the spur 
of the moment. I was too busy to spend any 
time on it beforehand," or, "I was not notified 
that I was going to be called on till the even- 
ing came." In a word, we used to think it 
more to our credit, if we ever succeeded in do- 
ing a thing well, to have it understood that we 
did it without spending much labor on it. My 
friends, I know that I am still a child in many 
things, but I have at least outgrown that bit 
of childishness. I never feel more highly com 
plimented than when told that people think I 
work, and work hard, for whatever I accom- 
plish. However much or little I may succeed 
in giving, there is worthiness if I at least make 
an earnest and honest effort to give. 

As I have often said, I make no claim that 
the profession of the minister is intrinsically 
more sacred than any other. But as it is my 
own profession, I may perhaps be pardoned 
in being epecially jealous of its honor and I am 



328 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 



getting to be almost irritable over the quite 
common practice of assuming that you can give 
me an idea as to how a certain clergyman is 
succeeding by telling me how much he gets. 
Nay, tell me rather, if you can, how much he 
gives. 

And this is the true test of all our lives. 
How much does the physician give in making 
men stronger and healthier, and so happier? 
How much does the lawyer give in securing 
the ends of justice? How much does the teacher 
give in sharpening and enriching the child's 
mind, and filling his heart too, with high ideals 
of living? How much does the manual la- 
borer give in increasing, in making more real 
and abiding, that material prosperity which is 
the essential foundation of any wholesome 
social life? How much do we all give, in our 
little contacts with one another every day, by 
contributing those graces of the soul which 
make man something more than brute? 

To give or not to give, that is the question 
for all of us. Right here the road parts. The 



HO IV MUCH DOES HE GET? 



329 



one path means success, the other failure. The 
one means life, the other death. What says 
our text? "Beware of too much good staying 
in your hand. It will fast corrupt and breed 
worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort." 

And now we must not miss the application 
of our thought to what is distinctively called 
the religious life. Here too, we have been in 
the habit of making altogether too prominent 
the question, "How much does he get? " Some- 
times we have gone to the extreme of assuring 
men that another has paid it all, all the debt 
with God. There is nothing left for us to do 
but to accept this substituted service and so 
get eternal happiness in heaven. 

Last Sunday afternoon as I was sitting in 
the depot waiting for my train, a good friend 
who was distributing tracts gave me a handful. 
I turned to one of them and read this bit of 
prose arranged in the form of a stanza: 
" Now there's nothing remaining for you to do, 
But to rest on the work He accomplished for you. 
Oh, come as a sinner deserving of Hell, 
Trust Christ as your Saviour, and all be well/' 



330 HOW MUCH DOBS HE GET? 



But what interested me still more was an- 
other containing a graphic diagram. It is too 
small to be shown to you from the pulpit but 
you will trust my description of it. It is called 
"Two roads to Eternity." At a particular point 
the road forks. The upper branch is called 
"The Narrow Way." It leads to glory, sym- 
bolized by a crown. The lower is called "The 
Broad Way." It leads to hell, which the artist 
considerately has refrained from symbolizing 
at all; but one is referred for it to Psalm ix, 17. 

Let me digress to remark that this reference 
is based on the old incorrect rendering in the 
King James' version. Keep in mind that the 
ancient Hebrews had nothing of the modern 
notion of hell as an eternal place of torment. 
This verse is translated in the revised version 
"The wicked shall return toSheol," that is the 
place or receptacle of the dead, where the 
shades of all the departed go; or in other 
words, "The wicked shall be destroyed." 

But to return to our diagram. We are tlod 
that between these two ways there is n& mid- 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 



331 



die path; and between their termini, glory and 
hell-fire, is a great gulf fixed. But, what is 
of special interest to us, along one edge of 
"The Broad Way" runs what is called "The 
Clean Footpath." It is the path frequented by 
those people who make no profession of relig- 
ion but seek as best they can to live upright 
lives; those who have been described as "alto- 
gether given over to mere morality," the people 
who are unwilling to seek salvation by having 
imputed to them, as their own, the righteous- 
ness of another, but in fear and trembling seek 
to work out their own salvation by giving to 
the world a righteousness of their own. This 
"Clean Footpath," like "The Broad Way" by 
the side of which it runs, ends in hell. My 
friends, I implore you shun "The Narrow 
Way," "The Broad Way" is much better; but 
be sure to stick to "The Clean Footpath. " 

"Is your husband a religious man?" inquired 
a friend. "I am not quite certain," was the 
wife's reply; "when I hear him speak in pray- 
er-meeting, I think he is ; when I hear him 



332 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 



speak at home, I think he is not." Says Em- 
erson, in the pages which I read to you, "The 
instinct which leads every generous soul to 
impose on itself tasks of a noble asceticism 
and vicarious virtue are the tremblings of the 
balance of justice through the heart and mind 
of man. " 

As Polycrates flung his ring into the sea, 
men have sought to give up some of their nap- 
piness in order not to overdraw their bank ac- 
count with the Eternal. But penance is need- 
less. In the little experiences of every day 
there is an abundant opportunity for the needed 
self-sacrifice by which we can give to the world 
as much happiness as we seek to get. It is 
harder to be righteous at home than in the 
prayer-meeting; but it is the hard things that 
are worth having, and nothing else will take 
the place of this personal virtue, not the chas- 
tisement of another, no, nor of one's self. 

An ingenious author has insisted benevo- 
lently that "the man who is hanged, having 
by that event paid his debt to society, ought 



HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 



333 



not to be held in dishonor; and in like man- 
ner he who has been condemned for seven years 
to be flogged in the galleys, should, when 
he has served out his time, be received again 
into good company as if nothing had happened." 
But no such external penalties can offset in- 
ternal sins. However we acquire it, I say, 
nothing but personal righteousness will pass 
muster at the bar of the Most High. 

And do not confuse personal righteousness 
with self-righteousness. This tract which the 
colporteur gave me makes this fatal confusion. 
Self-righteousness is not real righteousness, for 
real righteousness is self-forgetting. Self-right- 
eousness sustains the same relation to personal 
righteousness that vanity does to beauty. In 
all humility, in all modesty, but in all earn* 
estness, let us seek to build up within our- 
selves and so give to God and humanity that 
personal virtue which is the distinguishing 
characteristic of all genuine morality, This 
is the distinctive quality of that "Clean Foot 
path" which, wherever it leads, is the only 
proper road to take. 



334 'HOW MUCH DOES HE GET? 

Here are the two pages of life's ledger. At 
the top is the name of each one of us, in ac- 
count with the Universe, debited with all that 
we get, credited with all that we give; and the 
balance is struck at every moment of our lives, 
and with unerring exactness. 

"Though the mills of God grind slowly, 

Yet they grind exceeding small. 
Though with patience he stands waiting, 

With exactness grinds He all." 

More and more may we fall in love with that 
ideal of self-forgetting, giving, which in the 
infinite account-book shall insure us a goodly 
balance on the credit side. 



THE END. 



I 



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